Whats Working in 2018 PDF

2018
WHAT’S
WORKING
IN AFFILIATE
MARKETING
Insights from the Affiliate Marketing Industry's Top
Affiliates, Traffic Networks, Affiliate Networks, Spy
Tools and Other Industry Experts
Report compiled by:
Matej Cechvala (aka Matuloo), Amy Cheung (aka Vortex),

Senior STM Forum Moderator & Senior STM Forum Moderator
Owner of Matuloo.com
Disclaimer
No part of this report may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by

any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording
or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written
permission from STMForum.com or iStack Holdings Inc.
The insights provided by each individual affiliate or company

representative are their respective opinions. The reader is solely
responsible for deciding whether or not to act on the advice presented
in this report. STMForum.com or iStack Holdings Inc. cannot be held
responsible for any outcome that may result from the implementation of
the ideas presented in this report.
STMForum.com or iStack Holdings Inc. do not assume and hereby

disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption
caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result
from accident, negligence, or any other cause.
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Table of Contents
Disclaimer 2
Introduction 6
Before Reading This Report 8
Bird’s Eye View 11
Intel From Spy Tools 13

Adplexity, Ziga Naglic, Founder 13
Analyzed.ai ‘desteny’ (on STM), Owner 17
Insights From Affiliates & Other Industry Experts 18

John Alanis (‘johna5150’ on STM), Email Marketer 18
David Atias (‘mation’ on STM), Media Buyer 20
Taiwo Balogun (‘cashmoneyaffiliate’ on STM), Affiliate and Blogger 22
Dmitry Braun (‘mrbraun’ on STM), Affiliate and STM Moderator 24
Besmir Bregasi (‘bbrock32’ on STM), STM Co-Founder 26
Jed Cabanero (‘jennatalia’ on STM), Affiliate turned Entrepreneur 28
Matej Cechvala (‘matuloo’ on STM), Affiliate and Blogger, STM Moderator 30
Amy Cheung (‘vortex’ on STM), Affiliate, STM Moderator 32
Emanuel Cinca (manu_adefy on STM), Founder of Adefy.com and WTAff.co 35
Thomas Claflin (‘hlyghst’ on STM), Affiliate 37
John Crestani (‘johnaff’ on STM), Affiliate 39
Ian Fernando (‘ianternet’ on STM), Ad Click Analyst 40
Zack Franklin (‘Zack’ on STM), CEO of AMZKungfu Inc., STM Moderator 42
Oded Gendler (‘kalel’ on STM), Investor, Entrepreneur, Co-Founder theOptimizer.io 44
Erik Gyepes (‘erikgyepes’ on STM), Affiliate, STM Moderator 46
IMRat (‘tijn’ on STM), Recovering Affiliate 47
Franz Kanehl (‘fjk87’ on STM), Affiliate, Managing Partner at Monetizer 48
Angus Kong (‘anguschkong’ on STM), Super-Affiliate 49
Tim Konijn (‘stickupkid’ on STM), Affiliate, STM Moderator 50
Mitesh Muley (‘miteshmuley’ on STM), Affiliate 51
Kulwant Nagi (‘kulwantnagi’ on STM), Blogger and Affiliate 53
Charles Ngo (‘dr_ngo’ on STM), Super-Affiliate 55

Raj Patel (‘RajPatel’ on STM), Super Affiliate 57
Andrew Payne (‘Mr Payne’ on STM), Affiliate and Agency Owner 59
‘RubyTunes’ (on STM), STM Moderator 61
Kelly Sheffield (‘thedudeabides’ on STM), Affiliate, STM Moderator 62
Servando Silva (‘servandosilva’ on STM), Affiliate and Blogger 64
Christina Szekeres (‘fbqueen’ on STM), Affiliate 67
Ten (‘adsflo’ on STM), Internet Marketer 69
Insights From Traffic Networks 70

Adcash, Thomas Padovani, CEO 70
Adnow, Adnow Team 74
Adskeeper, Sergii Chalap, Native Advertising Expert 76
Avazu mDSP, Eva Huang, Head of Avazu DSP & IMB 78
Exoclick, Oliwia Kaluzynska, Head of Advertising 81
Go2Mobi, Meghan Casault, Director of Marketing 83
PopCash, Radu Burcheci, CEO 85
PropellerAds, Arnis Augstmanis, Head of Marketing 87
RevContent, James Adams, Senior Advertising Executive 90
Taboola, Andrew Milk, Sr. Director of Product Marketing 92
Traffic Junky, Traffic Junky Team 94
Traffic Stars, Peter Rabenseifner, Managing Director 97
Zeropark - Neill David Burton, Head of Account Management 100
Insights From Affiliate Networks 102

Adcombo, Peter Brembar, Product Manager 102
Addiliate, Christoph Brughmans, Co-Founder 104
Affiliaxe, Oran Furman, Senior Affiliate Manager 105
Aragon, Todd Stearn, Co-founder and CEO 106
ArmorAds, Ivan Carrillo, Managing Director of Kimia Group 108
Bitterstrawberry, Tommy Johnson, Business Development Manager 110
Brokerbabe & Glize & Xcash, Stefan Muelbaur, Co-Founder 113
Clickdealer, Henry Whitfield, Head of Global Supply 115
Gotzha, Fabrizio Manese, VP 117
Leadbit, Egor Bruskin, Founder 119
Maxbounty, Brody Curtis, Senior Affiliate Manager 120

Mobidea, Nelson Nascimento, Publishers Director 122
Monetizer, Vincent Schilberg, MD Germany 123
Mundo Media, Mike Semira, VP Supply Sales 124
Yeahmobi, Maggie Xu, Associate Director 126
Advidi, Petar Joseph, Head of Marketing & Communications 127
Summary 130
The Walking Dead 130
One Foot in the Grave, But Still Alive 130
Coming Back From the Dead 131
The Survivors 131
The Runner Ups ... 133
And That’s a Wrap! 134
Next Step 135

Introduction
Every year for the past several years, STM Forum Administrator Hugh
Hancock, known on the forums as “caurmen”, would put together a
“What’s Working in [current year]” post. And it would always receive lots
of “Thanks” from members.
He was the ideal person to write such a post, as he not only had extensive
experience in affiliate marketing, but he also talked to a great many
people in the industry on a regular basis - online as well as at conferences
and local meetups - which had kept him up-to-date on the current pulse
of the affiliate marketing industry.
Unfortunately for both STM and the rest of the world, our beloved Hugh
passed away suddenly in February this year - as he was about to attend
the STM local meetup in London.
So, with Hugh gone, we decided to take up the task of writing the “What’s
Working” post for this year - year 2018 - in his honor.
And, to make Hugh proud, we decided to make this one even bigger
than all the previous ones.
We wanted to turn this into a real community collaboration.
We wanted the result to contain a ton of value.
We decided to provide the information free-of-charge to everyone.
With these goals in mind, we set out to contact lots of the most
successful affiliates and other industry experts. We contacted
representatives from traffic networks and affiliate networks. We
contacted owners of spy tools.
We sent them questions that were designed to shed light on the ultimate
question: What’s working this year? (You’ll see a list of those questions

in the next section.)
As it turned out, everyone was very supportive of our endeavor. In just

2 weeks, we received over 50 replies! So many individuals have taken
valuable time away from their work to contribute to what they saw as a
worthy project.
This makes us at STM truly grateful, and at the same time excited for you
- the reader - who we know would find a ton of value in the resulting
report.
We at STMForum.com would like to dedicate this report to Hugh

Hancock. If you did not have the good fortune of having met or known
him, you can find out more about Hugh in the following tributes:
In Memory of Caurmen - Tribute by Lorenzo (MrGreen), STM Co-

Founder
Machinima founder and VR developer Hugh Hancock has passed away
In Memoriam: Hugh Hancock
On Hugh
We know Hugh would be proud and appreciative of everyone who has

contributed to the making of this report.
Last but certainly not least, we would like to sincerely thank YOU - as
your taking the time to read and benefit from this report is what will give it
life and value.
With Much Appreciation,
Amy and Matej, Senior STM Moderators
(P.S. As thanks for showing interest in this report, here is a coupon code
for 20% off 1st month’s subscription to our forum: STM2018)
(P.P.S. Already a member of STM? Check out our spanking new mobile apps now - for
iOS and Android)

Before Reading This
Report
We know you must be eager to get started, but we need to quickly tell
you 3 things that will help you to better understand the report:
1) This report is separated into 4 main sections:
a)Intel from Spy Tools
b)Insights From Affiliates and Other Industry Experts
c)Insights From Traffic Networks
d)Insights From Affiliate Networks
We sent out a different set of questions to each group - you can find
them at the end of this section. Because the questions are long, we will
not be including them with each set of answers.
Instead, we will be replacing each long question with a much shorter

form of the question. For example, this long question:
“1. Can you introduce yourself really briefly to the readers please?
Where are you from and how long have you been in AM.”
Will be replaced by just:
“1. Self-intro”
2) Because many replies contain intel on multiple verticals and traffic

types, it would be difficult to group replies by either vertical or traffic
type.

Instead, we have assigned tags to each set of answers. For example,
if you’re wanting read about Native Traffic, simply look for the tag
“Native”.
3) In each section, replies are ordered by the starting alphabet of

either the individual’s last name (or forum username if their full name
is not made available), or the name of the affiliate/traffic network they
represent.
__________________________________
For your reference, below are the questions that were sent to the
contributing parties, and the corresponding short forms. (Note:
Questions below have been rephrased for better readability.)
Questions for Affiliates & Other Industry Experts:

1. Can you introduce yourself to the readers please? Where are you from
and how long have you been in affiliate marketing. (Short: Self-intro)
2. You may have been operating actively in multiple verticals and traffic
types. Are there any that you moved away from recently because they’ve
stopped performing? (Short: Declining verticals & traffic types)
3. What are the stable or growing verticals and traffic sources for you?
(Short: Stable/Growing verticals & traffic types)
4. Where do you see the affiliate marketing industry headed in 2018, in

terms of popular verticals and traffic types/sources? (Short: Where AM is
headed)
Questions for Traffic Sources:

1. How many years have you been in operation? What types of traffic do
you have and how much traffic volume is available? (Short: Intro, traffic
type and volume)
2. Over the past few months, have you seen a growth or decline in the
traffic volumes you have available? On average, did prices go up, down or
remain similar? (Short: Changes in traffic volume or prices)

3. Of the traffic types and creative formats you offer, are there any that
are showing signs of extinction, for example due to the new Google ad
regulations? And are there formats/types that you expect to grow in 2018?
(Short: Growing / Declining traffic types and creative formats)
4. As a traffic network, you can see what advertisers are promoting. Can
you name some trends please? What verticals are losing ground and
which ones are gaining it? (Short: Growing / Declining verticals)
5. Based on the trends you see on your network, what traffic types/
formats and offer verticals would you recommend for affiliates to focus
on? (Short: Traffic types / ad formats / verticals to focus on)
Questions for Affiliate Networks:

1. How many years have you been in operation? In one sentence, what
type of offers is your network’s main focus? (Short: Intro and verticals)
2. Are there verticals that are showing clear signs of decline, when
it comes to overall volume of conversions/sales? (Short: Declining
verticals)
3. Are there verticals that are showing clear signs of growth, that affiliates
should focus on? (Short: Growing verticals)
4. Are there verticals that are ever-green/stable? (Short: Stable verticals)
5. Can you comment on which traffic types that are showing signs of
decline or growth? (Short: Declining/Growing traffic types)
Questions for Spy Tool Owners:

Because each spy tool is different, no specific questions were sent, except
“we’re creating a report on What’s Working in 2018 - please contribute
any intel that you feel would benefit our readers - offer verticals, geos,
angles, etc.”

Bird’s Eye View
In the remainder of the report, you will see detailed comments from top
affiliates and affiliate/traffic networks.
However, we thought it would help to provide an overview first, in

graphical form, on what - according to parties we’ve interviewed - are
the best traffic types and verticals.
Every positive comment we see in their replies, directed at a specific

traffic type or vertical, is recorded as one vote towards that traffic type or
vertical. The graphs below are a summary of categories that received the
most votes.
Disclaimer: What qualifies as a “positive comment” is subject to our

personal interpretation. Thus, the graphs below are only approximations/
estimates, and should be treated as such.
Note: Input from traffic networks is excluded to keep this graph as

unbiased as possible.

Note 1: Input from affiliate networks is excluded to keep this graph as
unbiased as possible.
Note 2: “Dating” includes mainstream and adult dating. “Finance”

includes debt and insurance, “Men” includes male enhancement, erectile
dysfunction and muscle. “Gambling” includes casino and sports betting.

Intel From Spy Tools
Adplexity, Ziga Naglic, Founder

Links: Adplexity Native, Adplexity Mobile, Adplexity Desktop, Adplexity
Adult
Tags: Native, Pop, Desktop, Adult, Sweepstakes, Mobile Subscription,

Gambling, Binary, Forex, Gaming, Ecom
Intro
My name is Ziga and I am the founder of the competitive intelligence tool
AdPlexity.
We are monitoring mobile, native, desktop and adult advertising markets

in order to show you what kinds of campaigns are working well for your
competitors.
Mobile
Mobile (especially pop) was the rockstar of 2016 and 2017. There was
huge traffic volume available, it was less strict in terms of compliance (no
hassle of losing accounts like on FB for example), offer payouts were low
– meaning you could get to green with less testing budget spent. It was
the perfect traffic type for everyone including newbies.
Now, volume is still there, however it’s a lot harder mainly because of
the regulations. Traffic sources are stricter because they don’t want to
get banned by Google. Due to many people doing really shady stuff
(autosubscribing, iframing) - straight up fraud basically, rules have also
tightened on the mobile carrier level. They introduced extra steps in the
DCB flow, some carriers even dropped DCB completely.
As a result it’s pretty hard nowadays to find good converting sustainable

offers.

Even though there are still plenty of people who are (successfully) running
pops, many people decided it’s not worth the hassle and went to other
traffic sources.
At this moment, even though we still see a bunch of different verticals

running, sweepstakes seem to be working the best for the majority of
affiliates.

Native
Before the “crackdown” of mobile pops, not many affiliates were
interested in native. Traffic costs were much higher compared to pops
and as a result you need to spend much more in order to optimize
campaigns and become profitable.
This has changed by late 2017 and native is gaining popularity among
affiliates rapidly.
There are quite a few different big traffic sources which are different in
terms of traffic quality and compliance rules so what is working well
depends on each traffic source itself.
Based on our data, RevContent is the entry point for a majority of affiliates
and it’s also the most popular. With proper disclaimer on your landing
page, it’s possible to run even things like weight loss, skin or brain pills.
This is also the case for traffic sources like Content.ad or MGID. We also
see that dating seems to be doing quite well on MGID.
Taboola and Outbrain are stricter in terms of compliance, but we are

seeing more and more affiliates starting to run there recently. Physical
products and info products work really well there.
AdNow appears to be the least strict in terms of compliance, and is

mostly used by blackhat affiliates.
Regarding markets – affiliates are still mostly interested in Tier 1 (US/UK/

CA), Tier 2 (DE, FR, IT, ...) and Tier 3 (mostly VN,TH,PH and some parts of
LATAM).

Adult
Adult was hit hard in February this year due to Google’s new regulations.
Traffic sources paused a lot of existing campaigns and affiliates had
problems staying compliant with new rules.
As always, affiliates found a way to adapt and nowadays we are seeing

mostly ED and dating promoted on adult traffic sources.
Desktop
Compared to mobile or native, desktop is not that popular among
affiliates, however evergreen niches like gambling (casino, sports betting),
binary, forex or games with proper angles are still working well there.

To see more on what (creatives, landing pages, offers) and where (traffic
sources, publishers) other affiliates are running, using AdPlexity, please
click here.
Analyzed.ai, ‘desteny’ (on STM), Owner

Link: Analyzed.ai
Tags: Facebook, Solar, Debt, Legal, Ecom, Cost Per Sale
Info based on U.S. data.
Whitehat
The classical verticals: solar, debt relief, legal (claiming benefits) are still
being run, but a wider range of affiliate ecommerce offers are appearing,
including various gadgets, but also products for the home.
Blackhat
The «cloaking apocalypse» of 2017 and the MIDs issues have made it
harder to run. AMs seem to be pushing affiliates towards straight sale
offers, but we’re seeing almost no evidence of those actually being run.
Trials are still the game.
We have started to see the use of chatbots to run blackhat. PPE ad,
person comments on the ad, chatbot sends him/her a link to the cloaked
presell.

Insights From Affiliates
& Other Industry
Experts
John Alanis (‘johna5150’ on STM), Email

Marketer
Link: John Alanis’ Resource Page
Tags: Email, Dating, Adult, Men, Health, Biz Op, Diet
1) Self-intro
My name is John Alanis from Austin, Texas, and I have been in direct
marketing since 1996, online marketing since 2001.
2) Declining verticals & traffic types

Since 2004 I have been in the dating vertical for men, which I now call
the “horny guy” vertical. The great thing about dating/horny guy vertical is
it is an evergreen market, and tends to buy a lot of stuff outside of dating -
fitness offers, nutra, etc.
I’ve moved away from Google and Facebook, not because the traffic is
bad, but because they are so difficult to deal with.
3) Stable/Growing verticals & traffic types

I’ve always dealt with traffic sources that like money, i.e. media buyers
who have relationships with sites that are happy to sell banners, etc. with
few restrictions. CPC email has been very good to me as well, and that
appears to be a growing traffic source. One reason why I go to events like
Affiliate summit and pay attention to STM is you can meet people who

have either traffic they can sell, or can broker traffic from websites they
have special deals with.
I use traffic sources to drive visitors to an opt-in page, build an opt-in

email list, then email offers, content, etc. on a daily basis. Email is still as
stable as ever, although the strategy has changed a bit. When I started,
people checked their email using Outlook on desktop, and if they got
too many emails, they got grumpy. Now they check webmail on their
phones, in a “snapshot fashion” so you have to email a lot more than you
previously did.
4) Where AM is headed
I am always a fan of evergreen verticals - dating/horny guy business,

health and fitness, etc. because customers last a long time and buy a
lot of stuff. Verticals like money making and weight loss will always be
popular, but the lifetime customer value tends to be short term so you
have to constantly replenish your list.

David Atias (‘mation’ on STM), Media
Buyer
Tags: Facebook, Google, Native, Finance
1) Self-intro
My name is David Atias, I’m known on the STM forum as Mation. I’m 21
years old from Israel. I wrote 2 very informative guides on the Facebook
forum on STM - I wrote about how to crack the algorithm of Facebook
and how to scale properly on Facebook.
I started off when I was about 13 years old with email marketing, I used to
promote finance-lead generation offers. Once I gathered enough capital I
tried to move into media buying - I heard that the “big” money is there.
I signed up to STM after I heard good things about it on another free

forum. Back then $99 was a bit expensive for me especially when I didn’t
have a CC, and I was using my mom’s CC for everything I needed (huge
thumbs up for my mom for supporting me), but I knew that it was worth
it because I heard that STM was a pretty big community and there were
a lot of affiliates that bought media across different platforms over there
and there was a lot of knowledge being shared.
Long story-short, joining STM was one of the best decisions of my life -
STM opened my eyes to a lot of opportunities in terms of meeting new
people and discovering new verticals, offers and traffic sources. These
days I’m putting most of my efforts on expanding my media operation,
we are running on Facebook mainly and also on Google.

In general, I’m running on mainstream traffic sources such as Facebook
and Google. I never really stopped running on those platforms, however
Google and Facebook are becoming stricter and you need to know how
to adjust yourself to the consistently changing TOS.

My main traffic sources are Google and Facebook. However, I know that
Native is pretty big now and a lot of affiliates are shifting into it.
Speaking of verticals, in general Finance is very big now - the crypto-

currencies booming raised HUGE awareness across the world and people
started to get more curious about finance-related things. People started
to understand the need for good financial solutions and it opened a huge
opportunity for affiliates to take advantage of and to approach the market
with financial offers.
It’s really hard to say, especially these days when advertising platforms
change their TOS so fast and can wipe-out a whole vertical if they want
to - for example, over the years Facebook banned Dating, Gambling and
recently Crypto as well. The main traffic sources will always be here and
there are always new verticals that you can run on them, however, these
days, it might be a good idea to explore new “less-tapped” traffic sources.

Taiwo Balogun (‘cashmoneyaffiliate’ on
STM), Affiliate and Blogger
Link: CashMoneyAffiliate.com
Tags: Google, Native, Facebook, Pop, Sweepstakes, Antivirus, COD, Nutra,

Crypto
1) Self-intro
My name is Taiwo Balogun, I live in the United Kingdom but spend
most of my time abroad usually in Thailand and I’ve been doing affiliate
marketing for over 6 years now.

I used to be super heavy into promoting antivirus offers on pop/redirect
traffic. I actually hit my first big campaigns in that vertical, so there will
always be a special place in my heart for scaring people into thinking
their phone has a super virus and they need to install an app or enter their
mobile number to fix it.
I’ve moved away from promoting these kinds of offers, mainly because
since the Chrome update the quality of traffic has dropped on popup/
redirect traffic, and domains running these campaigns get flagged by
Chrome and antivirus software much more quickly.

At the moment credit card submit sweepstakes offers are huge and
converting well for me. These are offers where visitors enter their credit
card information and pay 1€ for the chance to win a free iPhone X or
some other prize. Adwords, Native and Facebook are all traffic sources I
use to run these offers and they all perform well.
I think the 3 biggest verticals in 2018 will be cash on delivery Nutra offers
in 2nd and 3rd tier GEOs that many affiliates have not really focused
attention on, cryptocurrency trading offers and of course sweepstakes
as people will always love to try to get their hands on free coupons and
iPhones.

Dmitry Braun (‘mrbraun’ on STM), Affiliate
and STM Moderator
Tags: Pop, Display Banner, Native, Push, Pin Submit, Sweepstakes
1) Self-intro
My name is Dmitry, I am 21 years old. I’m German/Ukrainian, who was
born in Russia. Now I’ve moved to Amsterdam. I’ve worked in AM already
8 years, since I was 13.

Yes. I used to work with Doorways and Pharma/Download Content/
Dating/Essay offers, had good results there, but after 2 years of profits it
became harder, so I left this traffic type. I worked with Nutra for a long
time, but stopped, because I don’t like this vertical. I know all this stuff,
it doesn’t help and often has bad quality. I worked with News traffic. We
made many “dirty’ news and monetised this traffic. Also it’s a bit too
amoral for me.

If we talk about sources, I prefer: Pop, Banner, Native, Push. These are the
most stable sources for me.
I don’t like FB, Adwords and other places where you have to lie, farm, use
VPN, fake accounts etc. I prefer to be honest with everyone. Even with my
sources and advertisers.
Also I’m creating now some Android apps for getting free traffic. Maybe I
will write about it soon!
As for verticals, I can’t say that Pin Submits is very stable vertical. There
are many changes each month. Offers stop, geos stop, rules becoming
stricter. But this vertical will be live for a long time! Flows are changing,
but it will stay alive 100%, just with different type of monetization.

Of course, push traffic will be more popular. All pop sources are trying
now to collect their own base of subscribers and sell the traffic.
I don’t think there will be some big changes in pop or other types of
traffic.
If we talk about verticals, the most popular will be: Pins, Sweeps - they
both will be popular forever.
But we will try to push some new offer types. It can be Clothing Sweeps
(e.g. H&M, Zara), some services, so not just sweeps for iPhone 7/8/X. The
same with PINs. We will run adblockers instead of antivirus, try games on
push sources. Adult and nutra will be popular as well, but I can’t say a lot
about it, because these are not my main verticals.

Besmir Bregasi (‘bbrock32’ on STM), STM
Co-Founder
Link: STMForum.com (Use coupon code STM2018 for 20% off 1st month)
Tags: Google, Pop, Facebook, Adult, Banner Display, Push, Native, Health,
Ecom, Finance, Lead Gen, Crypto, CC Submit
1) Self-intro
My name is Besmir, currently live between Florence and Tirana. I’ve been
in AM since 2009 and am also one of the co-founders of the STM forums
and iStack.

Being in the industry for so long (10 years in AM = 30 years in any
traditional industry) I have seen that things come and go in waves. Every
year or couple years usually one vertical is going down while there is a
new hot one coming up.
Since 2008 I remember everyone was on Adwords. Then it got more

difficult and people switched to PPV and PlentyofFish. From there, I can
count many trends that at some point made quite a few people rich.
Facebook, adult, mobile display, mobile pops, push notifications, native
ads etc. etc.
So the point is, it’s normal in AM for things to die down and new to come
up.
These days, mobile pops, which has been pretty consistent for a few
years, got more and more difficult. And contrary to what many people
think, the problem is not the traffic, but the offers getting heavily
regulated. I know quite a few people still making thousands a day there,
just not as easy as it once was, where you could fire up AdPlexity and
within a day have something profitable.

Right now I see two major sources being hot. One is Native Ads, which is
still increasing every year, and the second is FB.
On Natives, these days you can run most of the typical affiliate offers. So
health, ecom, finance leads etc. It does require a good budget to start
since traffic is expensive, but on the other hand if you find something that
works the scaling potential is huge.
As for FB, I see eCom still working and lead generation has been a
consistent vertical for many years now.
As I said, I would put my bets on FB and Natives as traffic sources, and for
offers, a lot of eCom and lead generation. If the price of cryptocurrencies
goes up again I can see crypto offers doing some big numbers since
everyone believes they can become a crypto billionaire these days.

Jed Cabanero (‘jennatalia’ on STM),
Affiliate turned Entrepreneur
Link: JEdCabanero.com
Tags: Display Banner, Native, Pop, Video, App Install, Sweepstakes, Adult,
Forex, Debt, Diet, Dating, Male Enhancement, Downloads, Retargeting
1) Self-intro
I’m JEd, more entertainingly known as ‘jennatalia’ on STM (say it out loud).
My background has largely been banking and finance on the securities
side. Up until I entered affiliate marketing I was responsible for building
out trading algorithms and further automating analysis to make my teams
faster and more efficient. I’ve been in AM since 2014 - although I’ve
experimented in the industry since 2008.

Some of the underperforming verticals include: App installs, cc sweeps,
forced continuity, adult dating, paid porn, and forex. Traffic wise, I’ve
moved away from display / banner for primary leads, and relegated them
to secondary retargeting.

The best verticals by far are - in no particular order - Debt, Diet, Dating,
Dollars, Dick-size, and Downloads. As for traffic sources, I look to buy
traffic only from the Alexa 1M websites. The ad unit is mostly irrelevant
with the exception of display / banner ads.
Moving forward, the rise of Cryptocurrency offers will potentially fuel a
bubble. What’s interesting is that there has not been a recession in the
US for a little over 10 years now - and we’re becoming overdue. With the
recession coming and potential rushes to fiscal safe havens, I would be
surprised if the value of cryptocurrencies falls with it.
I would also look more into SAAS type platforms. Their overhead is not
nearly as linearly correlated as with product-based verticals. That limited
correlation means more margin to pay affiliates to bring customers into
those platforms.
I expect video, native and similar content-type advertising to become the

preeminent ad-unit and a lot of legacy ad units (banner, pop, etc) go the
way of the text-ad.

Matej Cechvala (‘matuloo’ on STM),
Affiliate and Blogger, STM Moderator
Links: Matuloo.com
Tags: Display, Banner, Adult, eCommerce, Leaden, Sweepstake, Crypto
1) Self-intro
My name is Matej, but most people know me by the nickname Matuloo,
that I’ve been using ever since I became active in the online space. I’ve
been doing affiliate marketing for 20 years by now, so pretty much my
whole adult life :) During those years, I’ve tried pretty much everything
there was to try in AM … and I got my UPs as well as some DOWNs. You
can find me on the STM Forum, where I have the position of a Senior
Moderator and I also blog on Matuloo.Com, from time to time.

That’s right, over the years I had to switch verticals and traffic types a few
times already. I started with organic traffic, then moved to paid advertising
… when Google started to go crazy with their Pandas and Penguins. If I
had to name one THING that I moved away from recently due to poor
performance, it would be Mobile Carrier Billing offers … the regulations
became to strict, so it’s VERY hard to profit in this space now. To give you
one more example, in the not so distant past, I moved away from App
Installs too … the initial app craze is over, people are not so hungry to
install new apps so it got harder. And on top of that, advertisers started to
require pretty insane KPIs, so I moved elsewhere.

I always “fight” on two fronts … one is Adult, the other is Mainstream
traffic. When it comes to adult, the vertical I push the most is Dating,
this is an evergreen vertical that will always work to some extent. On the
mainstream side, LeadGen is pretty stable … be it simple Sweep-like SOIs
or something more advanced like a form submit in finance, or some
customer surveys … I also touched the Crypto Affiliate space this year.
When it comes to traffic, I’m always running “banner” traffic the most, I

like the extra chance at pre-selling that banners give me.
We all know that Google announced a crusade against POPs, so far no
sky is falling, but the pressure is there … I think POPs will still stay here
and serve newbies as the perfect playground. Facebook and Adwords
will keep dominating the traffic business. Native will grow further, both in
Mainstream and Adult … the new Google “better ads” initiative will force
networks to look for more banner formats that can blend with content.
The CTRs on banners keep on going down a bit, but I still think they are
here to stay and won’t be replaced by native anytime soon.
As for the Verticals … there are some evergreens like Nutra, Dating,
Casino/Gambling, Lead Gen in many forms … eCommerce … these are
here to stay for sure. With the general pressure to offer real value to the
end consumers, I would expect eCommerce to grow further. Quality Info
products and educational material also has it’s space in the business … I
expect the Crypto Bull-Run to resume rather soon, so Crypto related info
offers, ebooks, courses … this could be pretty hot in a few months from
now.

Amy Cheung (‘vortex’ on STM), Affiliate,
STM Moderator
Link: STMForum.com (Use coupon code STM2018 for 20% off the 1st
month.)
Tags: Pop, Facebook, Lead Generation, Nutra, Ecommerce
1) Self-intro
I was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to Canada when I was ten.
I’m currently based in Toronto, Canada, and have been doing internet
marketing full-time since 2006.
Over the years I’ve done interesting things to generate revenue - things
were crazy-easy back then. Some examples, that no longer work today,
are 1)using software to build millions of pages of scraped content based
on massive lists of long-tail keywords, to make money with Adsense ads,
and 2)direct-linking to Clickbank offers on Adwords.
In 2015 I came across and joined STM, and shortly thereafter signed up
for the pilot 6WAMC course, where I got acquainted with Zeno (David
Savory) who created the course. Several months later, he nominated me
for STM forum moderator. I accepted and have been happily replying to
forum posts ever since.
In addition to moderating the forums, I have also TA’ed several rounds

of 6WAMC. Balancing my STM duties and my own campaigns hasn’t
always been easy, but both endeavors have provided me with immense
satisfaction - especially when STM members would tell me they’re
achieving consistent 2/3/4-figures/day in profits, and crediting STM with
the knowledge and advice that was needed to get where they are.

Pop had been my main focus for several years, but for the past year or so
I’ve been gradually moving away from this traffic type.
With more and more competitors entering the market, fewer good
CPA offers and tighter offer caps, increasing volatility in campaign

performance, higher traffic prices, and shorter periods of profitability, the
increasing amount of effort required to achieve decreasing ROI was no
longer worth it for me (although I am still making profits).
Another big reason why I decided to move away from pop, was my
increasing dislike of having to use aggressive/misleading marketing tactics
to make a quick buck. But by running whitehat, it would be twice as hard
to make profits on pop - so naturally, the more I shifted towards whitehat,
the more I shifted away from pop.
In spite of all that, I still recommend for newbies to start by learning pop.
This is STILL the easiest traffic type to start with to get one’s foot in the
affiliate marketing door, that does not require a big budget to master
(compared to most other traffic types).
Running pop campaigns will teach new affiliates how to set up tracking,
how to systematically test offers and creatives, and how to analyze
campaign data and optimize campaigns accordingly to profitability.
Brand new affiliates that have only been learning pop for a few weeks
from my 40-Day Step-by-Step Pop Tutorial have reported consistent 2- to
3-figure profit days. Having said THAT, I would strongly advise for affiliates
to expand beyond pop once they have some experience - for the same
reasons I’ve stated above.

I’ve been doing testing on Facebook, exploring first nutra and then ecom,
and have seen promising results for both.
Nutra I’ve since moved away from, mostly because (again) using
aggressive marketing to mislead consumers is not my cup of tea. I’ve
decided to focus more on ecom moving forward.
I feel that moving from blackhat to whitehat would be wise for long-term
viability. Some affiliates enjoy constantly jumping through hoops to figure
out new ways to game the system and (potentially) make big money for
the short-term, and I respect that. But I now prefer to build more long-
term assets using more reliable, whitehat methods.

In terms of promising traffic sources: Facebook and Google are the
biggest sources with the most volume and scalability, so would be worth
mastering. Also, a lot of affiliates I know are doing well on Native, and it’s
a natural progression from pop.
As for promising offer types: Lead generation will always be in-demand

for as long as there are businesses that need customers, and physical
products will always be in-demand for as long as there are consumers.
In terms of approach: I feel that with increasing competition in the affiliate

marketing space in general, we affiliates should start looking beyond
simply directing traffic to CPA offers to make a quick buck. 1)Building a
niche following using an efficient funnel consisting of various marketing
channels (e.g. email opt-in, push notification, FB chat bot, FB pages and/or
groups, FB and Google retargeting, SEO + paid traffic, collaborating with
other list owners for cross-promotion, influencer marketing, etc. etc.), 2)
nurturing this following by providing massive value, and 3)monetizing
them with affiliate products or our own products (branded physical
products, and/or digital products) over and over, would achieve a much-
higher customer life-time value. This will in turn allow us to pay more to
acquire each customer/lead for our funnel.
I would suggest to explore tier 2/3/4 geos for lead gen or ecom. The
level of competition between tier 1 and tier 2/3/4 geos can be night
and day. Credit card penetration for a lot of the lower-tier geos is either
low or non-existent, which makes COD offers the perfect offer type to
promote to these geos.

Emanuel Cinca (manu_adefy on STM),
Founder of Adefy.com and WTAff.co
Links: adefy.com, wtaff.co
Tags: Display, Pop, Facebook, Google, Email, Amazon, SMS, Push, App Install,
Ecom
1) Self-intro
My name is Manu, I’m a Romanian affiliate living in beautiful Vienna, top
ranked city for quality of living for 9 years in a row now. ;)
I’m the founder of Adefy.com. I started affiliate marketing in May 2015.

For sure, mobile display and pops have really made a turn for the worse
in 2017. Just to make it clear, since there’s been a lot of talk about “traffic
sources dying”: There is still plenty of volume left for both display and
pops. They are not likely to die out but there’s a big issue when it comes
to how affiliate offers perform on them as of late. I think both traffic
quality went down but also offer quality is suffering.
On a panel at AWA2017 we even discussed how CPI advertisers from

China have realized that they aren’t making money on the installs and
have greatly lowered payouts and heavily increased KPI requirements.

If you would have asked me this one month ago I would have said
Facebook, hands down. Now, with the Cambridge Analytica scandal still
ongoing, it’s more difficult to say. I still think Facebook will be a major
player, but it’s hard to make a prediction on how advertisers are affected
by this scandal, what changes in policy will happen across the board, if
any.
In general, what I’ve learned in these 3 years is that things move fast, they
are unpredictable and that you need to create a diverse set of marketing
skills, so that you are not just resilient but also antifragile.

The main lesson from all this from me is that you want to “own your
customer/leads”.
If you want to get some stability and be around for the long term,
you have to start creating a direct channel to your potential audience
- you want to not pay over and over again to reach the same people.
Get approval from leads to send them emails, text messages, push
notifications, etc. You drive costs down by being able to reach them over
and over again for free once they have given you permission.
In terms of traffic sources, my money is on Facebook Ads and Google

AdWords when it comes to performance/affiliate media buying. Literally.
That’s where I’m buying traffic now.
As for verticals - ecommerce is still interesting and welcomed by both

giants. The only caveat is that it cannot be low quality dropshipping.
My small tip here is that you should not think in absolute terms - think
relative. Developed countries have high quality products and fast delivery
from Amazon. The opportunity for affiliates and small entrepreneurs is
where Amazon is not dominating yet, and where people are not used to
this extremely high quality service.
In other words, look for geos and niches where you don’t compete with
Amazon in ecommerce, and you stand a chance.

Thomas Claflin (‘hlyghst’ on STM), Affiliate
Tags: Pop, Facebook, Sweepstakes, Lead Gen
1) Self-intro
Hi, I’m Tom, Hlyghst on STM. I started AM in 2014 and was a student in
Zeno’s first 6 week affiliate mastery challenge. Since then I’ve gone on to
earn multiple 7 figures in white hat affiliate earnings.

I used to run mostly pop traffic with sweep offers, predominately in the
USA but also in many other geos. I don’t run either of these anymore
because I haven’t found a way for it to be cost effective. In the last 3
years pop prices have risen probably 5-10x. Whereas sweep payouts have
stayed mostly the same. I don’t really know how anyone makes it work
without access to super cheap pop inventory.

In terms of affiliate offers. FB still works, but right at the moment they are
being very difficult in response to recent news headlines.
I think BH will keep on going as usual, with the same traffic sources and
same verticals.
I think pure media buying arbitrage with white hat offers will continue to
get more and more difficult as media costs rise. I think the days of a lone
media buyer making a thousand a day profit with a few WH campaigns
have passed. For WH you will need to run it like a real business. Team,
budgets, biz dev, processes.
I think affiliates will also have to bring more value to the table than just
buying cheap traffic. Whether that is by becoming a trusted info source
in a specific vertical or creating some useful front end tool or application
and monetizing it with aff offers on the backend. Or something else.

As always, affiliates have to earn their margin. I don’t think an aggressive
creative and squeeze page is good enough anymore.
Also just general lead gen done in a creative way is a huuuuge industry.
If you’re really good at spamming linkedin and generating leads for high
ticket offers (some fancy b2b SAS for example), then the world is your
oyster.

John Crestani (‘johnaff’ on STM), Affiliate
Link: JohnCrestani.com, IMJetset.com
Tags: Facebook, Nutra, Video, Biz Op, Finance, Youtube, Software
1) Self-intro
I’m John Crestani, I’ve been doing affiliate marketing (unsuccessfully)
since 2009, and (successfully) since 2012! STM has had a massive
influence in my success. Nowadays I spend a lot of time traveling, building
my startup, and hanging with my family here in Venice California. My
affiliate campaigns are pretty autopilot and provide me the cash needed
to pursue my passions which I feel very fortunate for.

I’ve moved away from nutra. Merchant processors have been clamping
down on the advertiser side, and it’s gotten super saturated on the affiliate
side. I’ve also stepped away from facebook, because it’s also pretty
saturated with affiliates, and the margins are much thinner.

Bizopp and financial, and youtube ads. Bizopp is a beautiful space to
be in, and one I started transitioning to a few years ago. The lifetime
value of a customer in this space is through the roof, and there’s plenty
of opportunity for cross-promotions and software sales if you build a
good-sized list. I really like Youtube ads because the ROI is massive once
you figure it out, and there aren’t many ‘guru’ types out there teaching a
playbook for how to effectively buy ads on youtube.
I believe the importance of creating ecosystems focused on specific
verticals, and continually offering value/promotions to those in that
ecosystem is going to be key. Better monetization = better affiliates. I also
believe things will be moving increasingly towards video, on all platforms.
Facebook video, youtube, videos on landers, etc.

Ian Fernando (‘ianternet’ on STM), Ad
Click Analyst
Link: Adroots.com
Tags: Native, Facebook, Google, Video, Health, Finance, Lead Gen
1) Self-intro
My name is Ian Fernando and I am a digital online marketer. I have been in
this industry for 13+ years making my first dollars with eBay and gradually
moving into the affiliate space.
I am currently traveling South East Asia and have been bouncing from
country to country depending on my visa situation.

I only stick to tier 1 traffic sources but I am also continuously testing other
sources as well. More recently I was into native heavily but steered away
from it past couple months. I will probably get back into it to further test it
as there are more tools out there to help manage native ads.

Facebook and Google are the best traffic sources that I have been
utilizing. I grew up and learned on Google and they will always be the OG
of digital ads. They have learned over the years to cater to the audiences
and not much also changes happens, unlike Facebook where they are still
learning the ad space but provide far more data - we will see where that
goes.
As far as verticals ever green ones are the best to be in. Health, Wealth,
Relationships. There are others as well that are very good to be in, such as
lead gen items for local businesses, such as local crossfire gyms or wine
and paid events. Businesses are always looking for new customers.

It is interesting to see the evolution of the ad space. I do not see it going
away any time as businesses always needs more sales and leads. We
are essentially the middle man of the internet. As far as traffic sources,
it will be more transparent, data restrictions may give halt to the best
consumers access. Until then verticals will remain the same to the
evergreen and verticals will always be ever changing, I doubt there will be
a constant vertical as this industry changes to adapt to us.
I feel also native will improve much better as it is still brand new and will
be taken advantage of. It reminds me of the beginning days of Google
Display. Video will be much better than traditional ads as well. I have
not advertised much on video yet, but I think that is where it will move
forward too as everyone wants to be entertained.

Zack Franklin (‘Zack’ on STM), CEO of
AMZKungfu Inc., STM Moderator
Link: AMZKungfu.com
Tags: Amazon, Facebook, Native, Google, Ecom, Shopify
1) Self-intro
I’m Zack Franklin, an American expat living in Shenzhen, China – the
global hub for ecommerce and the “factory of the world.” I’ve been
in Affiliate Marketing and Ecommerce since 2014. I currently focus on
Amazon, and I’ve generated more than $10 million in Amazon revenues
over the last year.

I’ve seen a decline in performance and more hassle through
Facebook and on Amazon advertising. There are 3000 new Amazon
sellers everyday, and the ad auctions are getting crowded. However, it’s
still profitable and worth running, just not at the same level as it used to.
Amazon has continued to get more restrictive, especially with reviews and
buyer-seller communication, but this has mostly worked out for the better
and leveled the playing field.
Facebook introduced a lot of new headaches, but since we’re running

white hat the damage has been minimal.

Native has been great for ecommerce this year, we’ve been
moving into Native more because of its manual nature and it’s been easier
toset and forget.
Google also added Name/Address matching to create audiences. This

allows us to start running remarketing campaigns for Amazon on Google
which is driving up lifetime value and increasing the frequency of
purchase. Previously, Facebook was the only network that offered this.

In 2018, I don’t see ecommerce going away, but I think the
margins are going to shrink dramatically for Aliexpress-Shopify
dropshippers.
Affiliates are going to find their edge by running this as a more traditional
business – negotiating with factories, ordering in bulk, shipping by sea
and storing it in local warehouses will decrease their costs and allow
them to be more competitive.

Oded Gendler (‘kalel’ on STM), Investor,
Entrepreneur, Co-Founder theOptimizer.
io
Link: theOptimizer.io
Tags: Facebook, Native, Pop, Adult, Finance, Solar, Cost Per Sale
1) Self-intro
Originally from Israel. Left the homeland a few years after starting to make
affiliate marketing really work. Lived in Barcelona, Florence, Moscow, Sao-
Paulo now made Amsterdam my home away from home.

We did everything from adult, FB, mobile pops to natives.
As of now we are mainly focusing on Natives and FB is trending up again

actually (all WH). We no longer do mobile pops as we find that offers are
unreliable or stable.
Natives is our bread and butter as most of the offers we run are high
paying leads (in finance and solar) or straight sales (we do no rebills).

Natives. WhiteHat. The allure of blackhat and cloaking is obvious. But as
a good ex partner once told me - “We Strive To Become More and More
compliant with each passing day”. We might make less in the short term
but we’ll be here still making our steady revenue when the cloakers and
“system hackers” will be kinking the next angle.
Now, I’m not saying cloaking isn’t sustainable. I know a few fellas who
made it their art. However, it’s hard to scale a business and take more
overhead when you know your revenue can go down by double digits or
even be totally quashed. Eventually the house always wins (whether it’s FB
or Google).

Plus I don’t like being in a mindset of checking daily stats and seeing XX%
decrease due to accounts death or new algo implementation. It’s more of
a bank robber/mobster mentality. Always chasing the next angle instead
of focusing on proper business growth and structure.
I’m not a guru. I’m not here to sell the wishy washy make you feel good if
you buy my high ticket item I’ll teach you how to make 10k/day.
I think the wild wild west of the internet is diminishing. In the old days if
100 people would try to make 1k/day profit and 30-20 would succeed
after spending a few grands, I think today maybe 5-10 people can
succeed after spending 5 figures.
I think a great way to look how copy paste link/ performance based
marketing is working is to see the influx of gurus and let me teach you
how to make money courses. For me, a guru is a person who used to
make great money online, because of a great offer, source, relationship
with source/offer etc (there are many variants of that) and today is
teaching and swaying away from the performance based formula (I spent
$1 to make $1+) to pay me for my knowledge and I’ll hopefully make you
positive returns. That formula is stripped from the performance model of
spend $1 to make $1+.
For me, the more gurus, the harder it becomes to make money as
a “standard” affiliate arbitraging traffic. Again, this is a much deeper
discussion. But Guru influx is a good indicator to our model of
performance based, copy from aff network declining.
For me, it’s either become guru (selling knowledge for a fixed price,
no guaranteed results. Yeah sure put a 60 day iron clad money back
guarantee - LOL) or go tech - take all those scripts and tools you
developed throughout your aff career and make them SaaS, build a
company around them etc.

Erik Gyepes (‘erikgyepes’ on STM),
Affiliate, STM Moderator
Link: ErikGyepes.com
Tags: Google, Pop, Facebook, Native, Push, Adult, Dating, Finance, Biz Op,
Lead Gen, Mobile Subscription
1) Self-intro
Hey, my name is Erik, I’m one of the moderators at STM forum and I
occasionally blog at ErikGyepes.com. I’ve started with AM at the end of
2014.

Mobile pop and redirect traffic was my thing during those years. The
traffic is still there, what changed a bit are the offers. Affiliates’ favourite
mobile subscription offers got regulated and changed flows, so I started
exploring different traffic sources and monetisation models.

Nothing is stable in the AM world. But I noticed a big shift towards
Facebook and native sources. I think vertical wise it has not changed
much. There are some core evergreen niches that will always be here:
adult, dating, finance, make money (bizopps) and lead generation of all
kinds.
For the traditional affiliates, I think native formats will be more and more
prevalent this year across many different traffic sources, whether it’s in
mainstream or adult.
I can also see new formats popping up like PUSH notifications that were
not here last year, or at least not on SSP platforms.The biggest sources
like FB and Adwords are not going anywhere, but they may get more
competitive and saturated as more and more advertisers are moving
there.
IMRat (‘tijn’ on STM), Recovering Affiliate
Link: IMRat.com
Tags: Pop, Facebook, Downloads, Funnel, Health, Gambling, Crypto
1) Self-intro
Dutch, living in England. AM since 2008 started with seo/adsense,
switching to paid traffic & aff marketing in 2009.

Pops/downloads - damn you G.
FB/health - damn you MIDs & CA.

Casino, “Crypto” … pretty sure health will be back, it always does. Like the
terminator.
Big brands starting to avoid Facebook & FB reducing inventory in
newsfeed. Not sure how this will play out. CPMs will probably increase
& approvals will be harder in the short term until this blows over and FB
starts worrying about quarterly earnings. That’s when the opportunity for
easy arbitrage may return for most affiliates. Until then - those that figure
out their FB funnel can make serious bank.

Franz Kanehl (‘fjk87’ on STM), Affiliate,
Managing Partner at Monetizer
Link: Monetizer.com
Tags: Pop, Push, Mobile Subscription, Pin Submit, App Install, Lead Gen
1) Self-intro
I’m in the affiliate industry for around 12 years and located in Germany. I
still run campaigns myself and I’m one of the guys running Monetizer.

Mobile carrier billing is getting more and more difficult with flows
changing, so the revenue on 1 / 2 click flows and pin submits definitely
decreased. They’re still working but usually the timeframes a country /
carrier does perform are getting shorter and shorter.

People should understand that a lot of traffic types that had been super
popular a year or two ago are coming back in different ways again. Think
of popups changing to tabunders, the same is happening with push
notifications right now - for sure one of the traffic types I’d watch most
this year.
CPL / CPI are probably evergreen, with the difference being that
advertisers are getting more picky on budgets and quality. Buyers got
smarter over the years, they assign budgets to quality that actually backs
out. The key is to work with advertisers and not against them - there’s no
money tree in the offices for them so people need to understand it only
works if both sides make money. I do think carrier billing will continue
to work in 2018 since carriers needed that revenue as well, but it’s not a
niche I would laser focus on these days.

Angus Kong (‘anguschkong’ on STM),
Super-Affiliate
Tags: Facebook, Pop, Ecom, COD, Instagram, Google
1) Self-intro
This is Angus from Hong Kong. I have been in AM since 2014.

I tested pop traffic in 2015 but it was not performing well enough for me.
Then, I switched to Facebook and Instagram as traffic sources and they
are still performing well recently.
In terms of verticals, I switched from nutra and leadgen to Shopify.

Following Facebook policy is a matter of time. I think we better get used
to the rules as early as possible.

Now I am doing completely white hat ecommerce with fb ads. Game is
getting harder but it is still profitable.
I think COD will be growing strong, because it requires higher barrier to
get into the market. There is not much competition.
For traffic sources, Facebook, instagram and adwords are still the best
traffic sources. They own the biggest databases of data.

Tim Konijn (‘stickupkid’ on STM), Affiliate,
STM Moderator
Tags: Facebook, Gambling, Binary, Pin Submit
1) Self-intro
It’s me Tim Konijn aka stickupkid from Amsterdam. I’ve been doing AM for
10 years now. Started with Adwords for my own comparison websites and
was working for a pin submit advertiser to generate sales and create new
offers.
From there I started specializing in Facebook advertising. Not per se

because Adwords didn’t perform, more because it took much time.
Facebook advertising is like breathing for me, I know my way around and
hardly fail to be honest when launching campaigns.

I have moved away from casino and binary, I tend to go back to pin
submits over and over again.

Facebook + pin submits still rock the nation. I remember working for a
pin submit advertiser for a while and we were saying back then already “I
wonder how long pin submits will last blah blah”.
And here we are, pushing hundreds of sales daily still! Affiliates become
smarter, traffic sources optimize and offer better ways to monetize,
advertiser find ways to avoid regulations all the time!
Facebook will still dominate. Less people doing blackhat, but the ones
who stick to it will probably bank harder than ever before.

Mitesh Muley (‘miteshmuley’ on STM),
Affiliate
Link: Mitesh Muley’s STM Profile
Tags: Facebook, Google, Native, Nutra, Dating, Sweepstakes, Gambling,

Ecom, COD, Pin Submit, CC Submit, Cost Per Sale, Free Trial
1) Self-intro
I am Mitesh Muley from Pune (India), born in Mumbai. I did my
engineering from Pune in Electronics and Masters from Hull University
(UK) in Radio Systems Eng. Started off with a business related to data
conversion 15 years back, and after 1 year I had to quit. For the next 5
years I worked in TCS and IBM, and worked in different verticals and roles.
During this duration, I had interest in finding bugs/loopholes in systems.
I had my first brush with affiliate marketing almost 12-13 years back, but
back then I thought it was a very small field so didn’t go very deep.
After my job with TCS and IBM, I started doing google maps for online
ticket reselling and did quite well. Then I got a client with pest control and
ran adwords, SEO, Google maps and whole marketing and bringing in
business. I started off as an affiliate making % of sale on leads I brought,
and later became a partner. After a year or so we decided to go separate
ways. I worked majorly on white hat clients for marketing for few years.
5 years back I was fed up with Google updates and decided to explore
affiliate marketing once again. I found out about STM in 2013. Started with
dating, then also worked on mobile offers with Lorenzo’s network Afflow
(Monetizer).
I tested different traffic sources and verticals to understand how things

worked. I like to explore and understand all the systems. But for the last
couple of years I have been focusing majorly on Facebook and Google,
running nutra mostly.

I have tested adult dating, mobile, PPV, pop, native, google, facebook as

traffic sources. I have run dating offers, sweepstake, pin submit, nutra,
casino, app installs, etc.
I personally feel running on dating traffic sources needs an edge, so don’t

run that.
Mobile offers were pretty good, but once you do high ROI campaigns and
spends, you tend to go away from it.

I will focus majorly on Facebook/Google/Native traffic sources.
For offers - nutra, sweepstake, casino.
Those are 3 traffic sources and offers I will run for 2018.
P.S) I have tried my hand at ecomm twice last year, but it was too much
work. Might not run ecomm in the future unless I have someone with me
to handle support stuff related to ecomm.
I think ecomm is going to keep going up, but there is going to be a drastic
change from dropshipping to giving value to your clients.
Nutra trials might not work as good as it used to in the past because of
MIDs, but COD or straight sale are still going to remain.
Casino might explode this year.
Mobile - pin submit and CC submit offers will still remain strong.
People who have made systems or doing programmatic media buying

will get stronger.

Kulwant Nagi (‘kulwantnagi’ on
STM), Blogger and Affiliate
Link: BloggingCage.com
Tags: Pop, Google, Bing, Native, Nutra, Sweepstakes, Crypto
1) Self-intro
Hello folks, I am Kulwant Nagi from India. I started my career as a blogger
in 2011 and ranked many sites with SEO to make 5-figure income within
2 years. Soon I was introduced with the term CPA in 2013, so I did a little
research and joined MaxBounty and PeerFly.
Started promoting some dating offers and made a decent income.

Later Facebook made some changes against dating campaigns and our
accounts got disabled. Soon we entered PPV, Google/Bing PPC and
moved forward to make even a better income.
I’ve been in the CPA industry since 2014 and I have seen almost all trends
coming and going.

Back in 2016, I was promoting mobile offers after buying traffic from
Go2Mobi, ZeroPark and 50onRed. But with time, I saw the trend declining
as my offers were no more converting on these traffic sources.
2017 was all about popups (once again) and we tested many traffic
sources to find profitable campaigns. I found PopAds and 50onRed way
better than all other traffic sources as they have many targeting options.
Later till the end of 2017, I saw a decline in pop traffic as well so I moved
to Google PPC.

In 2018, our biggest traffic source is Google. We are finding profitable
keywords in multiple goes and running ads with white hat landers.
I feel Google and Bing (search traffic) are a big winner, it is and it will be in

future also. It’s all about finding the right keywords and serving them right
products with a right angle.
Nutra is becoming hot. I see all big networks are introducing awesome
Nutra offers on their platform. Sweeps are still in the market and crypto is
making the market hot.
Nutra will be everywhere in 2018.
Industry is moving towards becoming more and more compliance is
coming forward to take control over it.
Recently Google introduced an algorithm in Chrome browser where they

are blocking annoying popups. This was bad news for affiliates who were
doing 4-5 figures a day with such traffic sources.
Further, Facebook and Google has stopped showing Crypto ads.
This industry is becoming big day by day and big players like Google and
Facebook are keeping their eyes on ads.
So running white hat offers would be something which we all should

focus.
In terms of traffic, I see Native is becoming hot day by day.

Charles Ngo (‘dr_ngo’ on STM), Super-
Affiliate
Links: CharlesNgo.com, AFFcelerator.com
Tags: Facebook, Google, Native, Pop, Funnels, Shopify, Ecom, Lead Gen
1) Self-intro
Hey!
My name’s Charles Ngo.
I live in New York City and I’ve had a full-time career in affiliate marketing
since 2008.
Me and my team run affiliate campaigns, write weekly on CharlesNgo.

com, and teach affiliate marketing at AFFcelerator.com

I’m not a fan of Native Ads.
I think it’s overly competitive, infested with low quality traffic, and lacks
great targeting ability.
I also think the Shopify dropshipping model is becoming more and more
difficult. It was super hot in 2017, but profit margins are shrinking fast.

It’s no secret that Facebook is one of the best traffic sources in the world
right now.
But all the recent heat on Facebook such as Cambridge Analytics will
make them even more strict towards affiliates.
I think there is opportunity in running lead generation offers on Facebook,

and even going a step beyond to creating your own funnels for them.

Cryptocurrency offers have the potential to be hot
.
When the Crypto market goes on another bull run then your average joe
will want to learn how to make money from Cryptocurrency.
Affiliates are facing a challenge where traffic sources are starting to ban
Crypto related offers.
Facebook Bans Crypto Offers
As far as traffic sources, I don’t see much changes. The best ones for
affiliates are Facebook, Google, Native Ads, and Mobile pops.

Raj Patel (‘RajPatel’ on STM), Super
Affiliate
Link: PayPerCallExposed.com
Tags: Pay Per Call, Pop, Native, Google, Facebook, SEO
1) Self-intro
Hi STM! My name is Raj from PayPerCallExposed.com. I am from Toronto,
Ontario Canada and have been in the affiliate marketing space for over
10+ years and gone through it all! I was doing this while working a full-
time corporate job as a senior manager of digital marketing, but 2 years
ago I quit my corporate job to make this my full-time income. Best
decision I made, and now I share all I know about pay per call marketing
in my course on www.paypercallexposed.com to help others. All STM
members get $50 off – PM me!

Yeah, for pay per call I have tried many different types, a few years ago
pop overs worked well, and native in some cases. But as of late they are
not performing as well for pay per call so I don’t invest there anymore.

No problem – I am all about sharing the knowledge to make others
successful! The 3 I use on a consistent basis for pay per call offers are:
-Call only ads from google
-Facebook ads with local business ad type (has call button)
-Lastly SEO, to organic traffic and free calls essentially. Which brings your
overall cost of business down. Allows you to invest more in paid media.
I know pay per call has been growing year over year. Just a short few
years ago only a handful of networks has pay per call offers, but now
there are so many. With the high payouts, and lower competition of
the pay per call space it’s a WIN WIN today and for the next few years.
Businesses need REAL calls from REAL customers so they will pay high
payouts for that, rather than some weak lead gen leads. Just saying.

Andrew Payne (‘Mr Payne’ on STM),
Affiliate and Agency Owner
Link: AffiliateSuccess.com
Tags: Pop, Display Banner, Native, Facebook, Sweepstakes, Dating, App Install,
Ecom, Shopify, Mobile Content, In App, Free Trial
1) Self-intro
Andrew Payne - affiliate marketer and agency owner based in Dallas,
Texas. I have been in affiliate marketing for the last 2 years and in the
digital marketing space for 10 years serving B2B clients. Check out more
of my insights at http://www.affiliatesuccess.com.

On the contrary, I have not moved away from any traffic types or verticals
but instead have expanded into new ones while managing existing efforts.
I have noticed some shifts in the space but while others walk away from
one type, I fill in the gap and generate more revenue in their absence.

We are still strongly invested into pop traffic, primarily mobile, as there will
continue to be opportunities in this space. However, we have expanded
heavily into mobile display, inapp, mobile native and Facebook. Some of
the stronger verticals have been sweepstakes, dating and CPI. And despite
beliefs of some, some of my students are seeing strong results in some
tier 2 and 3 geos for mobile content offers, but sweepstakes has been
more stable.
I see the Facebook trend will continue to gain popularity around the
Ecommerce / Shopify circles but I expect there to be a tightening of
advertising guidelines in regards to dropshipping that will make this more
challenging as the year progresses but still very viable.
In other traffic, various new mobile ad units are starting to pop up, while
volume may not be as substantial in comparison to Facebook or Adwords,
these new ad types offer excellent opportunities for those willing to try
something outside the box with little competition.
Pop traffic will continue to be a strong channel for us during 2018, being
creative and finding offers to make it work is the trick.
Verticals like sweepstakes, CPI, dating and trial offers will continue to
be strong while mobile content in tier 2 and 3 countries is still alive and
working.

‘RubyTunes’ (on STM), STM Moderator
Tags: Native, Facebook, Ecom
1) Self-intro
Hey, I’m RubyTunes! I’ve been in AM since around 2010 when I made my
first AM commissions with Clickbank (wow, I miss that buzz I got receiving
my first physical cheque in the mail!)

Yes indeed, it has been quite a journey over the years… I’ve run traffic on
PlentyOfFish, mobile display, pops, native, Facebook, just to name a few!
From promoting e-books, to dating websites, to apps, to dog training
courses, to sweepstakes and all the way through to physical goods.
My most recent shift was away from native ads - due mainly to rising
competition and stricter creative guidelines, which definitely cut into our
profits.

Can I get a drum roll? It’s SUPER SECRET and you might not hear this
anywhere else, buuuut I guess I’ll share just for you……… Facebook &
ecommerce.
Not so exciting huh? Obviously ecom on Facebook is super popular right

now and maybe not as easy as it used to be. But the idea of building a real
business where you can have a lot more control over products, branding,
and the whole process, makes it super exciting to me personally.
Now that many affiliates will be coming back to reality with their Crypto-
funded Lambo dreams shattered, I think we’re going to see an even
bigger push towards ecommerce on Facebook, and also across other
traffic sources. But you probably shouldn’t be asking me.. I chose to hold
my crypto portfolio…

Kelly Sheffield (‘thedudeabides’ on STM),
Affiliate, STM Moderator
Tags: Native, Pop, Automation
1) Self-intro
Hello! I’ve been in this industry for about 6 years now, and typically follow
that up with something like “a few years unsuccessfully, and few years
successfully” because I wasted a lot of time in the beginning not taking
enough action and overcomplicating things. I try to steer people away
from that now. I moved to San Diego 2 years ago, and absolutely love it
here.

I’ve run just about every traffic source over the years, but the majority of
my ad spend has gone towards pops and more lately native. I gradually
moved away from pops just simply because my main evergreen
campaign wasn’t performing as well. Secondly the competition was
getting increasingly aggressive with the landers, and I didn’t want to have
to go down that route to compete, or expose myself to more risk than I
was comfortable with. Once I found native I never looked back.

Native is my go-to source. It’s such an affiliate friendly traffic source,
particularly Revcontent because of the ability to run so many different
verticals, and have the ability to scale in the blink of an eye. There’s really
no big secret behind what’s working there - the big evergreen verticals all
tend to work there to some degree, you just have to find a solid offer.
I think native will continue to grow, with Revcontent being the most
exciting one to keep tabs on. Other than that I don’t have a lot to say
about traffic sources, but do have some thoughts about other things.
I see automation becoming more prevalent in helping optimize a

campaign or many campaigns, which is particularly exciting in bridging
the gap between individual affiliates and teams. But the real meat and
potatoes is still going to be in finding a winner offer and running it hard
before everyone else catches on. That and honestly just putting in the
time, effort, and money to really test creatives and landers which not
enough affiliates do in my opinion, or only do to a small degree in the
beginning.

Servando Silva (‘servandosilva’ on
STM), Affiliate and Blogger
Link: ServandoSilva.com
Tags: Pop, Facebook, Native, Funnels, Browser Extension, Sweepstakes, Tech

Support, Ecom, App Install, Pin Submit, Crypto, Cost Per Sale
1) Self-intro
My name is Servando and I live in Mexico City. I started my affiliate
marketing career back in 2011 when I was trying to add an extra buck
to my salary and that’s when I started learning the basics of traffic and
conversions. For almost 3 years I learned from many blogs and forums
about SEO and Social Media, which ultimately made me sign up to the
STM forum and where I realized this world was much bigger than I
expected.
I’ve been living from my online ventures since 2013 when I left my job
and got 100% into this and have no regrets so far. Perhaps my only regret
was not learning this before, but I’m sure we all feel similar.
Nowadays we focus 90% on paid traffic and building our own products/
services leveraging what I learned from CPA, SEO, Social Media, etc. to
help us build empires and assets that provide value to people. Oh yeah,
and from time to time I like blogging at http://servandosilva.com

Yes. We’ve been dealing with different traffic types in the last years and
many verticals that worked well or had a great run but later went down a
bit. For example, android apps were huge when I started with pop traffic
4 years ago and nowadays they’re much more difficult to crack there.
Also, we had some good runs with browser extensions and sweepstakes
with pops, but Google is doing a lot of things to bring pops down, and
while I’m sure people will still make money there we wanted to move into
something more scalable and more long term.
With FB we also ran sweeps, but we moved away completely from that

since we want to focus on pure white hat opportunities instead of dealing
with accounts and related issues.
Also I recall seeing a lot of people running tech support calls 3-4 years
ago as well as pin submits on mobile, but nowadays you don’t see those
offers as much as before due to compliance issues.

We shifted the 80/20 of our focus to Facebook, so you could say we’re
doing fine there. Facebook is always growing and it’s highly scalable,
although we might see some changes soon due to the privacy issues that
everybody has been talking about in Q1.
As for verticals, overall there’s a major shift from affiliates running CPA
offers to affiliates running e-commerce stores. I can see that growing
even more in 2018 with a few changes as Facebook cracks down on
some people to have better ad quality. Native is still also a great alternative
for CPA offers and there’s good volume as well.
Another trend last year was crypto currencies. Many affiliates decided to
focus there completely but I’m sure a lot left after this bloody beginning
of 2018. I still believe in cryptos but I’m super intrigued to know how they
will evolve during 2018. I guess many people expected a huge correction
but what they didn’t expect (me included) was for it to last several months.
We’ll see how it goes for the second half of the year.
Some things will never change in this industry. There will always be
your typical offers, but what I’ve seen from some networks is a shift to
e-commerce and longer funnels for sales based on CPS payouts instead
of CPL. Some networks will close (both traffic networks and affiliate
networks) as it happened last year, either because business is not going
well for them or because they want to focus on new things.
Many affiliates will try to build their own brands and maybe even launch
their own product-lines to build moats and not just drop ship from
China like everybody does. For new people entering the industry the
recommended budgets and sources to learn the ropes might change a bit

but for now pop traffic still provides a simple/efficient way to start learning
with low payout offers.
And who knows... maybe we’ll have another bull run later in the year and
so many affiliates will become crypto traders again. If affiliate marketing
changes a lot every year I’d say crypto can change a lot every 3 months.
Nobody knows what will happen until it does...

Christina Szekeres (‘fbqueen’ on STM),
Affiliate
Link: FBQueen.me, http://christinaszekeres.com, http://special.fbqueen.
me
Tags: Facebook, Lead Gen, Nutra, Casino, COD
1) Self-intro
My name is Christina Szekeres, also known as FBQueen from STM. I
grew up in Hungary and I’ve been a digital nomad in the past 5 years.
I am a successful businesswoman, with over 13 years experience of
building, running and operating my affiliate marketing business. I am the
soul and sass behind the FBQueen brand, my passion and purpose is to
help performance marketers take their business to the next level using
Facebook Ads.

It took me 3 years of struggle until I actually managed to find my first
successful campaign. It was an edu lead gen campaign on PPV traffic
(TrafficVance) back in 2008 (ish). I moved away from PPV when I saw
bigger potential in Facebook and I’ve been focusing on social media
traffic ever since.

My main focus has been Facebook as it’s an evergreen traffic source.
I found success in short-form lead gen offers in the past 2 years, however
the evergreen offers such as nutra, casino and COD are generating higher
ROI.
The most popular verticals in 2018 are casino and COD offers. I always
put a big emphasis on my client’s resources when it comes to selecting
the right offers to run, based on where you’re situated and what kind
of budget you have. One piece of FBQueen advice: Always take into

consideration what kind of competitive-advantage you have compared
to the others. For example if you speak German, take a look at German
offers first or if you have a background in selling products to women,
think about how you can use that skill in your campaigns and that’s how
you should select the right offers to run.
More and more affiliates are moving away from nutra as it’s getting harder
to find decent advertisers. Facebook will always be an evergreen traffic
source, in the meantime I hear many Facebook marketers expand to
Google Adwords as well. Another piece of FBQueen advice: Definitely
focus on just 1 traffic source at a time, master it first before you go and
hop around.

Ten (‘adsflo’ on STM), Internet Marketer
Tags: Facebook, Google, Pop, Sweepstakes, Ecom, Gaming, Crypto, App
Install, Biz Op, Monetizer
1) Self-intro
Hey, I’m Ten, from Adsflo. I’m based in KL, MY, and have been in the game
for 3 years now.

As a marketer we always should be on our feet. Change is always
constant, so we’ll have to adapt, or die. We have since stopped Mobile
for good, as it was taking too much of our time but generating the least
revenue. We also have moved away from sweepstakes, although sweeps
and mainstream used to be our main core.

Facebook is still a beast, and always will be, with tons of potential, so
we’re keeping up with the current trends on Facebook. Our team is
currently focused on ecommerce and gaming.
When I first started, everyone that I’ve met told me that few years from
now on, I’ll look back and say how easy it was back then. Indeed, it is.
Traffic sources being stricter (even pops!) and local regulations (MIDs,
telcos) have slowly seeped in the industry, making it somewhat harder
than before. Being more compliant and learning new verticals as you go
along should go hand in hand with your AM journey from now on.
Good verticals to be in right now are mainly ecommerce, gaming, CPIs,

and to some extent, crypto biz-op offers. On traffic sources, the two
largest ones still will be Facebook and Google, hands down. Also, there
are a lot of new ways to make money too, such as crypto, through
Monetizer/Afflow’s algorithms, etc. It’s an interesting time indeed where
we are forced to leave our comfort zones and to think out of the box.

Insights From Traffic
Networks
Adcash, Thomas Padovani, CEO

Link: Adcash.com
Tags: Pop, Native, Interstitial, Display Banner, Mainstream, Adult, Ecom,

Gaming, Finance, Gambling, Adult, Dating, Nutra, Sweepstakes, Pin Submit,
CC Submit, Antivirus, Binary, Crypto, Beauty
1) Intro, traffic type and volume

We have been in the digital advertising industry already since 2007, which
means that we have a solid 11 years of experience in this business. Before
that the Adcash management team was in the online payment industry.
Still monetizing.
We focus on delivering web desktop & web mobile traffic to our demand
partners (advertisers).
We aim to deliver a FULL self-service experience meaning that our clients

can do everything themselves. At the same time we do also offer account
management as well for both advertisers and publishers.
In terms of quantity we can talk about opportunities we are seeing at the

moment and it’s about 20 billion impressions/day. For coverage we have
very strong demand and supply in US and Europe, but our audience is
worldwide and the combo of direct + programmatic supply gives a great
fill rate as well as a massive global reach.
A majority of the impressions mentioned above are coming from our

direct (Adcash SSP) supply and the rest is through our programmatic
partners. Our self-service platform allows to acquire traffic exclusive to

Adcash as well as the traffic of our partners (listed here).
In terms of formats we work with all the main industry standards like
native, pop under, interstitial and display banners in various sizes.
2) Changes in traffic volume or prices

I guess desktop traffic is globally growing about 20% per year and mobile
around 40%.
Fact is that the numbers of providers in the market (desktop, pop, native)
are continuously increasing.
The result is that the inventories are split between multiple players. This
is the reason why we decided to combine direct and indirect audiences
through our DSP solution.
In pricing we’ve noticed a stabilization of the average RPMs/eCPMs on the

market. The market has become quite mature and both the publishers
and advertisers know what is the value of what they buy or sell.
In terms of business models between CPA and CPM/CPC more and

more platforms require advertisers to pay CPM/CPC, while the advertisers
themselves want their expenses based on the performance. That’s why
at Adcash we have developed our CPA Target tool based on machine
learning. You set your targeted CPA and our algorithms are buying the
right traffic for you and you can benefit from this technology on any of
the partners available on our DSP.
3) Growing / Declining traffic types and creative formats

I think we are one of many top players in the industry to recognize that
we are not seeing any decrease in the volumes of the formats we work
with. The fear strategy has definitely an effect on advertisers and budgets
because of rumors. We’ve all made an effort to accept some of the new
constraints and we are adapting to any rules or policies.
At the same time we have seen exponential growth in our native demand
and supply since its release.

4) Growing / Declining verticals
The main verticals remain similar, only products within these verticals are
changing: ecommerce, gaming, finance, gambling, adult/dating, nutra/
beauty and utilities/services.
The changes come also from the type of campaigns, following updates in
formats and the evolution of devices and the way they are used.
Gaming, for instance, used to be client gaming, then browser gaming and
now it is applications. Native shares the same placement with the banners
environment, push notifications are the new “intrusive” ads, but verticals
remain the same.
More examples: survey became sweepstakes that became pin submit

that became cc submit, or antivirus became device cleaner that became
device optimizer....binary options became crypto etc... you get the picture.
Our target is to welcome more and more ecommerce offers that are
currently on FB and Instagram.
5) Traffic types / ad formats / verticals to focus on

All the main historical verticals are still very valid, but the methods of
advertising have changed, since users cannot be aggressively flooded
with ads anymore. User experience and data will become the norm.
Which is why we’re also working on constantly creating new features in

that field, like our retargeting solution to be released soon.
It’s notable also that the financial vertical has seen a significant increase
due to the current ICO and cryptocurrency boom.
In terms of formats, the native is definitely the one leading growth

because it gives a new chance to promote a wide range of verticals that
were not performing as well with other formats.
Focus on creativity and try to imagine yourself as the user seeing the
ads. That will help create more attractive offers and eventually to convert
more users as well. Use metrics, metrics and metrics (Adcash provides an
EXTENDED level of reporting) especially if you’re a media buyer. Look out

for what’s hot and what the people need. For example, mobile app stores
give a really good insight into the tastes of users in particular geos - find
what’s trending and make it work for you!
Of course, find a partner to rely on and who’s willing to put time and
resources into proprietary technology! Machine learning and data science
are key components to competing at high scales. At Adcash we use
this tech to increase advertisers ROI, to increase the revenues of our
publishers and to keep our network clean.

Adnow, Adnow Team
Link: Adnow.com
Tags: Native, Push, Video, Mainstream, Dating, Nutra, Crypto, Ecom

Adnow project started in 2014 when founders of the company passionate
about digital marketing, RTB and Big Data came up with the idea of
creating a new hybrid native ad platform. Since then Adnow has been
growing exponentially year after year. By now our advertising network has
become global and cooperates with more than 160,000 publishers in 114
countries.
We always try to follow the latest trends and satisfy our users’ demands.
That’s why we are working hard to have not only Desktop traffic but also
Mobile.
At the moment we are working on a CPC basis but we expect to open

Adnow platform to other models quite soon.
Regarding the volumes we have around 1 billion daily views all over the
globe. Though each geo has its own statistics we are proud to hold a
strong position in Asia, LATAM, Western and Eastern Europe.

On planning to expand and improve the quality of services all the
companies must be aware of the difficulties that need to be overcome.
That’s why we’ve defined priorities and focused on our users’ needs, so
our decision was not only to expand in size but also improve the quality
of our inventory in countries where most of our users demand more
traffic.
It’s also clear that Google and Facebook policy changes affected all
advertising networks at that moment, but thanks to our top performing
formats and cutting-edge solutions, we managed to recover our traffic
volumes fast - the fact that allowed us to maintain pricing at about the
same level.
We wouldn’t say extinction but it’s clear to everyone that some formats
like PushAds or instream/outstream video suffered much from those
regulations. Native ads - our leading format – was not left completely
untouched by it either and that’s why we are constantly developing new
ways to upgrade our services so they won’t show any “signs of extinction”
like you’ve said.
Video Ad Revolution, Video Ad formats don’t come fully under the ambit
of ad regulation policies and are more user friendly thus enhancing user
engagement and increasing average session, so we believe these are the
formats with more prospects to grow in 2018.

First of all, we can name some verticals that are always on top. Verticals
like Dating or Nutra just can’t get outdated no matter what. It’s not easy to
specify one vertical which is losing ground now, although it’s way easier
to highlight the ones that are growing like Crypto or E-commerce. Just
like Nutra and Dating, Crypto and E-commerce might be the strongest
verticals now.
But we truly believe the most important is not the vertical you decide to
pick, but how you analyze all the data and how you use it to be one step
ahead of your competitors.

Like we’ve mentioned before, they should focus on data, be aware of the
best offers and be ahead of their competition.
Social media is booming and video formats are growing. Affiliates knows
the market changes every single day so it’s extremely important to stay
updated and prepared for all these changes.

Adskeeper, Sergii Chalap, Native
Advertising Expert
Link: AdsKeeper.co.uk
Tags: Native, Dating, Crypto, Forex, Nutra, Health, Gambling, Gaming, Biz Op

Essentially we serve native ad traffic worldwide providing user acquisition
opportunities for wide range of clients. We are looking forward to get
on board new partners (Direct advertisers, Affiliates, CPA/Performance
networks, Digital agencies) and offer our native ad solutions that are
going to boost the number of new customers acquired.
We’ve been on the market since 2013 and actually become one of the
first ad networks to adapt native traffic for the needs of affiliate marketers.
Our inventory is constantly growing as we have internal media buying
department which reach out to publishers directly on daily basis and buy
placements on their websites.
Approximately we serve up to 1 billion impressions daily worldwide.

I would say Brazil, India and APAC have been rising stars for the past
few months. We’ve experienced significant boost in volumes and
performance there. Currently it’s great direction to ensure an easy start
within our network, as the traffic is cheaper comparing to Tier1 countries
and level of competition isn’t that high.

We remain on the ‘light side’, so to say. Native ad traffic that we serve
totally comply with Google ad regulations, thus recent updates in Google
policy haven’t actually affected us in any way. We’ve been focusing on
native ads for more than 5 years already and remain confident the future
is bright.

As far as I’m concerned, in 2018 there will be an increase in number of
‘Native Ad Network Noobies’ appearing on the market and offering any
sort of discount or cashback in order to win marketing budgets. We can
really expect pop-under networks to change their focus dramatically and
introduce new formats, – native ads seems like an obvious choice.
At the end of the day marketers will decide whether they are ready to
get allured by flashy discounts or would prefer to get things rolling with
proven native traffic suppliers.

Mainstream/Casual dating is killing it in Tier1, Europe and Latam at the
moment.
Also we witness rising trend of crypto (forex) operators and ICOs

choosing native ads as the core advertising channel to push their offers
through.

Well, there’s a pool of arbitrage verticals that have been popular among
affiliates for several years already: like dating, nutra, health, gambling,
online games, bizopp, forex.
I suggest that affiliates should keep digging in this direction figuring out
new creative selling points that are going to let them maximize ROI.
Also for sustainable growth the key is to allocate additional budgets for
testing new verticals and geos.

Avazu mDSP, Eva Huang, Head of Avazu
DSP & IMB
Link: AvazumDSP.com
Tags: Display Banner, Native, Pop, Video, In App, Mainstream, Adult, App
Install, Gaming

Avazu DSP started in 2010 on desktop and launched mobile inventory in
early 2014. Now we have both mobile and desktop traffic to meet clients’
various demands.
Traffic Types: CPI bidding traffic, Banner, Native, POP, Video (inbanner /
instream / rewarded) on both mainstream and adult inventories.
CPI bidding is very unique to our platform. We are one of the first (if not
the very first) DSPs that supports bidding on app installation basis - yes,
we only charge when an app is installed. For CPI, we have the capacity to
deliver up to 200,000 installs worldwide on a daily basis.
Besides CPI, the current global traffic volume for display and other
formats is also large - up to 15 billion impressions per day.
More info can be found on our online knowledge base:
CPI Bidding Campaign
All Campaign Types

Avazu DSP has grown in traffic volume yet offering it at lower costs.
People would ask: how could this be possible?
The answer is because we are always optimizing our traffic based on

clients’ most updated demand and feedback. In the past few months, we
have established a few key partnerships with traffic partners who deliver

better performance (some are direct publishers that clients used to buy
via other intermediary), and clients are able to buy more traffic at a lower
price. This is not just limited to display or pop traffic - we are building
more volume in rewarded video such as with Unity and more publisher
groups for CPI bidding as well.
Preview our Global Traffic at Traffic Planning Panel

The market is evolving and is led by end users’ behavior and industry
regulations.
One major trend is, more direct advertisers are starting to look for traffic
transparency and working with DSPs. However some of them might
still have limited resources to media buy on CPM basis, and optimize to
CPA. To cope with clients’ demand, CPI bidding not only charges for
completed installs, but also allows them to do dimensional targeting and
budget setting, also to whitelist/blacklist any traffic sources. CPI bidding
campaign had a rocketing increase with our platform in 2017 and the
trend will continue in 2018.
Also, due to the expanding usage of mobile apps, mobile web traffic is
starting to shrink in volume, especially in tier 1 countries.

In developed regions the competition is more heated and regulations
are stricter. While many are still competing in the same territory, some
smart industry leading advertisers have shifted their direction to tier 3 or
even lower tier countries to explore user acquisition way ahead of their
competitors. And pop/banner within mobile web traffic is probably the
best approach to people in those areas.
There is also an increasing demand in app and gaming related offers

among Turkey, also Russia, Ukraine and other Russian speaking countries.

It is difficult to say which traffic / formats / verticals one should focus on,

since no traffic is made for all. Some clients have been buying banner
traffic for 3 years with the same type of offers on our DSP. Pop traffic
also works very well for non-mobile subscription offers; CPI campaign
of one app targeting only one country can last for more than a year with
thousands of conversions every day if you have a competitive offer.
Since affiliate clients are competing with direct advertisers and agencies
on the same platform, we advise affiliates to always take the opportunities
and put into action fast as one can. Think of the difference you have
between direct advertisers/agencies and think of the advantages you
have especially. Talk often with your account managers to be updated
with what’s new. Try new traffic, less competed regions before others do.
Instead of taking one offer from a Network and putting it directly on a
DSP - like anyone could - always add something innovative of your own,
such as building an aggregated page of various apps, in order to increase
the conversion rate.

Exoclick, Oliwia Kaluzynska, Head of
Advertising
Link: Exoclick.com
Tags: Native, Display Banner, Pop, Mainstream, Adult, Interstitial, Nutra, Dating,
Gaming, VoD, Gambling

ExoClick began in 2006. We have huge volumes of high quality traffic
and we serve over 6 billion daily ad impressions globally. Traffic can be
purchased via our ad network or programmatically via our ad exchange.
We have an excellent range of traffic from different verticals including
adult, mainstream and our exclusive members area dating traffic.
Targeting features include language, GEO and regional. Other targeting

features include site, contextual and keyword which are great for reaching
users that are interested in a specific vertical.
Our IP range targeting allows an affiliate to use ExoClick’s own IP range

database or use his own IP range list or a combination of the two.
Additionally we offer retargeting, frequency capping and day parting. Our

platform API allows the automation of all of the platform features that are
inside ExoClick’s admin panel.
Our traffic share algorithm gives affiliates automated control over the

traffic that they send to variant landing pages that they use to promote
individual products and offers.

Volumes have been stable but the ad format importance has changed, we
now have more impressions on Native, Members Area dating and Pre-Roll
In-Stream formats.

We were the first ad network to introduce native advertising
recommendation widget to the adult industry just over a year ago. In
March we introduced several new ad formats that are Google compliant
for both our advertisers and publishers. Due to its success we added 2
more Native advertising formats: the Exit and Interstitial. We also released
for Desktop the large Billboard Banner, In-Video (VAST), and Interstitial
Full Page and Interstitial Overlay, and for Mobile we also have Full Screen
and Overlay Interstitials. All formats can be closed easily by the user and
the content of our ads are monitored by our Compliance department to
ensure ads on our network are compliant. Here is a full list of all our ad
formats.
In 2018 we expect to see growth for Native and Pre-Roll In-Stream

Video and our new Google compliant formats, and also a decline in the
Popunder format due to Google regulations.

In our recent blog post 8 ExoClick Network Stats from 2017 you can
see some interesting insights into our network statistics, including the
different offers that advertisers and affiliates are running on our network:
the top 3 verticals are Nutra (31.37%), Dating (28.91%) and Games (21.62%).

It depends on the geo you want to target and the offer. For example in
Germany we are finding that Native is working well for dating because it
looks like the editorial content of a site, so it engages users. Our pre-roll
in-stream video format and our new Billboard Banner format, which can
also show video, are both converting well for cam offers in Germany.
Looking at Russia, subscription VoD offers are converting well on 3G,

and casino offers are also converting well both on mobile and desktop.
Affiliates focusing on casino offers in Russia should firstly get a good offer,
test all types of traffic so you can find the best traffic sources, then create
a whitelist of the best converting sites. Formats working well for casino
offers include Popunders, Banners and Native.

Go2Mobi, Meghan Casault, Director of
Marketing
Link: Go2Mobi.com
Tags: Mainstream, Display Banner, Native, Interstitial, Video, Ecom, Mobile

Content, Lead Gen, Sweepstakes, Nutra, Retargeting

Go2mobi was founded in 2011, offering the #1 platform for performance
marketers with access to over 750M apps, games and leading mobile
websites. Now in its 7th year, Go2mobi’s performance-driven mobile
DSP offers in-app, mobile web and desktop traffic in a variety of ad types:
native, banner, interstitial, video, and rich media.
Go2mobi currently has over 35B ad requests daily, and requests are
expected to climb further with the company’s upcoming integration with
BidSwitch.
January is typically quiet, but we saw the demand come quickly out
of the New Years slumber. This slow start to the New Year provides
opportunity for affiliates to buy earlier in the quarter before demand
increases. A tip would be to consider when demand increases (often at
the beginning of each quarter) and do the opposite.
Overall, prices have increased as advertisers are persistent in seeking

out higher quality inventory with less fraud, and new budgets are being
allocated each year. This is paired with decreased supply as industry
supply partners, such as Google Adx, Rubicon and others crack down on
fraud, further pushing up prices for high quality traffic.

Native programmatic has seen a steady increase over the past two years.
However, video is the fastest-growing, and this highly engaging format

it is not expected to slow anytime soon. Connected TV ad spend, such
as through game consoles, is also picking up pace providing both digital
capabilities and the immersive TV experience.

Strong trends right now include retargeting, eCommerce, CPE, PMPs
and Mobile Content. Affiliates on the Go2mobi self-serve DSP platform
have been experiencing great success, particularly with mobile content
and retargeting campaigns. Alternatively, we have seen less lead gen and
sweepstakes campaigns, as well as a decline in the Nutra/Pharma vertical.

Definitely video and native. These two formats have consistently provided
higher CTRs. They are less intrusive ad formats, which means people are
more likely to engage with them as it provides a better experience. For
affiliates, this also means a better quality of traffic, which leads to higher
ROI.

PopCash, Radu Burcheci, CEO
Link: PopCash.net
Tags: Pop, Adult, Mainstream, Mobile Subscription, Crypto, Lead Gen,

Sweepstakes, App Install, Nutra, Ecom, Gambling

PopCash was founded back in 2012, but its team members have been
active in the advertising space since 2007. We are focused on popunder
traffic, with 50 to 80 million visits daily, which cover both mainstream and
adult traffic, desktop and mobile, 3G and WiFi.

We can confirm that with the exception of normal fluctuations, we
haven’t noticed any dramatic changes, so ‘stable’ may be the best word to
describe the recent state of our traffic.

As mentioned previously, we cover everything in terms of popunder
traffic (mainstream and adult, desktop and mobile, WiFi and Carrier and
so on). Even though predictions for the Google update were terrifying, we
can now label it as ‘Much ado about nothing’ - we made the necessary
changes and kept the scenario under control. We also plan on expanding
our portfolio by adding other ad formats, but it’s a bit too soon to disclose
it now.

When it comes to trends, the perspective is a 360° one, because each
advertiser is focused on a specific vertical. From what we’ve noticed, there
are some 3G offers that no longer work due to the regulations imposed
by the mobile operators, but beside that, things are rolling smoothly on a
clear path. Also, what seems to have grown lately is the crypto segment,
as more and more people acknowledged the opportunities and are
working on earning as much as possible from it.

Affiliates are different, so we try to offer customized solutions for each of
them. Now, depending on what they are specialized in, the offers they
promote may vary from lead generations, sweepstakes, apps downloads,
nutra and e-commerce to gambling and online casino offers. If you are
a dedicated affiliate and the network you collaborate with assigns an
account manager willing to help you, there is absolutely no way to avoid
becoming successful!

PropellerAds, Arnis Augstmanis, Head of
Marketing
Link: Propellerads.com
Tags: Pop, Push, Interstitial, Ecom, Gaming, App Install, Gambling, Finance,
Travel, Real Estate, Software

We have been on the market for quite a while, in a few months we will
celebrate 7 years! It might not seem like a lot, but for an industry like ours,
it’s a significant period of time.
Last week the number of monthly users of our platform exceeded 1

billion! Impressive, isn’t it?
We also continue to increase the number of daily ad impressions and this

number has already reached 750,000 per day. As for the traffic sources,
more than 150,000 of them continue to work with us.
For all these years we’ve been known as the biggest source of pop-traffic,
and we are doing our best to stay on this position.
But we don’t stay still, and now the range of formats has been widened
with Native Push Notifications - this is the native one you all already know.
So now a rather large part of the traffic comes from the notifications.

I understand what you’re driving at so let me answer in advance - the
update of Google Chrome did not have a significant impact on us. We
did not experience any decrease in traffic, furthermore, we noticed its
growth. According to statistics, in last 2 months we have seen an increase
in traffic by 25%!
I think that the reason is obvious - we are trying to provide

comprehensive services for our publishers. Recently we have updated the

codes for the Popunder ad format, provided publishers with alternative ad
formats for better traffic monetization, and added new payment methods
- now payouts can also be processed through PayPal and Skrill.

Until now our top-performing format was the well-known Popunder, but
we have updated codes for this format to make it compliant with the new
Google Ad regulations.
We were anticipating the growth driven by Native Push Notifications,

and we were not disappointed with the results as they exceeded our
expectations. We believe that this format will show steady growth in the
next year. At least we see all the right conditions: the demand is high from
both publishers and advertisers.
At the moment, we are working on the new version of the Interstitial

format, but so far we cannot disclose the details, so stay tuned and check
our Blog soon!

The Software vertical is under the heavy pressure now, and our
advertising policy reflects this change. Unfortunately, the promotion
of software products is too frequently associated with malware, fraud,
phishing, and potentially misleading business practices at this time.
Yet, there is nothing to worry about: we continue to accept advertising

campaigns promoting legit software, but they undergo more rigorous
procedures. Details will be published shortly on our website.
We suggest you try the following verticals that show nice performance
especially on the Push Notifications: E-Commerce, Games, Apps, Sports
Betting, Gambling and Financial offers.
Our analysts predict an increase in demand from the Travel, Real estate,
and Insurance verticals, so we recommend trying them out.

Of course, we cannot but notice the interest in native formats, so make
sure to focus on this trend.
Also, pay more attention to the quality of your ads, landings, pre-
landers, and offers, don’t overdo with misleading ads (read the Google
Abusive Experience Report which lists ad experiences that are deemed
misleading).
Do not underestimate creativity: copy less, create more original ideas.

Creativity is always appreciated by the target audience.

RevContent, James Adams, Senior
Advertising Executive
Link: RevContent.com
Tags: Native, Health, Ecom, Finance, Free Trial, Crypto

Revcontent was founded in 2013. We came together seven years into the
native advertising industry with the mission to improve user-experience
for native advertising. We are now serving over 350 billion content
recommendations per month and reach 97% of US households daily,
according to Quantcast.

We started seeing a boom at the end of Q1 which has been really exciting.
Advertisers are feeling the extra traffic and scaling campaigns accordingly.
As advertisers have been scaling, the increase in overall traffic has allowed
CPCs to stay moderate which is great for new accounts coming on board.

Recent estimates from eMarketer predicted that over a quarter of US
internet users would block ads in 2018. We expect the shift toward more
user-friendly ads to continue to increase. Marketers are beginning to
realize that the “one-size-fits-all” method will no longer be acceptable.
Low-quality, disruptive ads, such as pop ups or large sticky ads, will
eventually be a thing of the past. In 2018, it is all about a user-friendly web
environment that delivers personalized, relevant experiences to users.
We are the newest Board Members with the Coalition for Better Ads, so
we play an important role in helping to define ad standards for the entire
industry, and our focus is always on user experience.

One trend in our network is the growth of e-commerce and financial
verticals. Newer offerings and products like electronics and financial
e-books are gaining volume as marketers continue to move away from
trial offers. In the wake of this, there has been an explosion of innovation
in health verticals that do not utilize a trial as the billing model. We’re
seeing a lot of video style content performing well in the US, while other
health models still are scaling internationally. While we expect to see
additional developments in compliance around Cryptocurrency-related
campaigns, many continue to boom internationally.

Affiliates should be diversifying away from Facebook and adopting
different methods of display traffic. We recently launched a new social
media technology to allow publishers and advertisers to reach their
audiences directly on media publisher sites with all the benefits of a social
media experience. That platform is delivering $18-$20 vRPMs and an
explosion of engagement.
Health verticals utilizing straight sales or other billing models not reliant
on trial offers should continue to grow as advertisers innovate.
As people are more aware of regulations and the industry changes,
e-commerce and finance products will continue to gain ground as well.

Taboola, Andrew Milk, Sr. Director of
Product Marketing
Link: Taboola.com
Tags: Native, Travel, Ecom, Finance

Taboola was founded over a decade ago. Globally, we make over 480
billion monthly recommendations on the world’s top sites. Marketers are
able to directly reach consumers in engaging and non-disruptive in-feed
placements across desktop and mobile articles on the open web, carrier
wake screens, and browser homepages.

Our network is growing all the time as we sign on new partnerships with
publishers. Given our expansion into many markets around the world,
the growth on all fronts is very strong quarter over quarter. It is hard to
comment on prices because there are many factors, such as vertical
and seasonality. That said, we are always focused on the post-click
performance of our advertisers and generally making sure that they are
able to achieve the campaign goals that they set out with at whatever
price gets them the most scale with good performance.

We have always believed in an open, ad-supported internet which is good
for everyone, including the consumers. As a member of the Coalition
for Better Ads with Google, we are committed to keeping our sponsored
content recommendations non-disruptive and native -- in line with the
Standard for Better Ads. I think any digital ad that is able to accomplish its
marketing objectives in a non-disruptive and transparent manner is poised
to grow in 2018, while other formats will have to adapt or become less
viable.

We are excited to see great emerging business in home goods, food,
apparel, and travel able to find success in getting discovered on the
Taboola network. Consumers in 2018 are really open to fantastic products
that offer alternatives to the household names they already know and
love. More than ever, businesses are able to grow and flourish online, and
we are proud of the role that our Discovery platform can play in those
stories.

As I mentioned above, great products and services around food, travel,
apparel, and home are really doing well, in addition to finance and
entertainment which have been strong for a long time.
Earned media -- positive articles written about your brand or product

-- are excellent content submissions to a network like Taboola. You can
take a great headline that would otherwise become old news, and keep it
amplified to millions of households using discovery.
Finally, we have seen that it is very important to make sure your creative is
really speaking to the audience you intend to reach. Create and promote
owned content that directly touts the benefits of the product or service
you are selling. Our trends.taboola.com site helps marketers stay up to
date on what is working best at any given moment in time.

Traffic Junky, Traffic Junky Team
Link: TrafficJunky.com
Tags: Adult, VOD, Gaming, Men, Male Enhancement, Nutra, Gambling,

Crypto

TrafficJunky is an innovative media agency founded in 2008. Traffic Junky
can help your brand connect with our audience (120 million unique daily
users) in 4 ways: Account Management, Customizable Campaigns, Self-
Serve Market Place, and Campaign Management.
TrafficJunky is an online platform, which aggregates publishers’ inventory,

segments it, and sells slices of it to affiliates, agencies, and direct product
owners. Our main focus is selling adult inventory. We specialize in selling
and managing some of the top adult tube sites in the world such as
Pornhub, Youporn, and Redtube.

Our publishers (Pornhub, Youporn, Redtube, Tube8) continue to find ways
to grow our user base. Typically we see prices increase due to natural
competition in our marketplace in Q4 and Q1, but this year the industry
was hit with some curve balls – Chrome’s Abusive Ads and Better Ads
Standards implementation - that could have caused an industry wide
price drop. However, it didn’t materialize, likely due to testing of new
creatives to replace the now non-compliant ones.
We can say our tier 1 market place saw price increases and our tier 2
remained stable. We continue to work on our tier 3 geos, as we saw the
rates slightly tail off at the end of Q1, but with a larger sales team, we
expect them to find new advertisers and products to promote there.

Deceptive creative formats will be slowly making their way out, such as
fake messages, fake notifications, fake site elements like fake close and
play buttons. These were all covered by Abusive Ads, but now Google is

rolling out the Ad Experience flags, which means that ads which contain
rapidly changing or flashing colors and images will no longer be allowed
on most sites. A lot of ad networks are pushing the “native” ad experience,
but we have yet to go down that path.

What we see work on our network has some seasonality to it and some
new comers. Typically, Q1, Q2 and Q4 we tend to see a lot of our clients
promoting dating, VOD, and animated games over the last year and half;
we can typically count on these guys to make a larger portion of our
revenues during these months. But, this time around 2017 we saw a big
uptake in customers coming to TrafficJunky from Facebook promoting
male enhancement and muscle offers, and these have been some of the
highest promoted products.
We spent a month updating the team on what these advertisers were

looking for, what spots on our network worked best for ED and muscle,
and today all new advertisers promoting ED are quickly shown what
works and what doesn’t on our network, providing a better opportunity
for success. If you’re an advertiser promoting any type of nutra, you
should contact TrafficJunky, as there are a lot of advertisers doing well.
With gambling and casino, these offers come and go, as there seems to
be a lot of restrictions and seasonal approaches to advertising. We tend
to see January to June do well for sports betting, and September to
December do well for the casino offers. We work with a lot of affiliates
and direct offers in this field that catch whales on our network.
In terms of trends, we’ve seen a big uptake in crypto advertising since

mainstream traffic sources have stricter restrictions on what and where
they can run, the same goes for marijuana and CBD advertisers. One
trend we hope to see return are mainstream apps. 3 years ago this was
a profitable vertical for our customers and our publishers liked seeing
mainstream brand offers running on their sites, so we hope apps will
make a big return.

The future of TrafficJunky is moving towards a more agile media agency,

that allows our team to help customers create customizable campaigns
across our network. The most important thing for our customers to focus
on (affiliates, agencies, product owners) is their marketing, whether it be
landing pages, banners or any other tools they need to convert the user.
Let TrafficJunky focus on where and how to spend the money. We train
our guys to be Traffic Junky experts, their job is to tell you what tools
inside of TrafficJunky will work best for your unique campaign. Our team
has a lot of knowledge of what works and doesn’t and we want them to
share this information with our clients to steer them in the right direction.
The goal is stretch their test budgets and see a profit as soon as possible.
Every offer/product has a place on our network, we serve roughly 4.2

billion impressions daily, but it’s about placing the right offer on the right
ad unit and our team is well aware of that. They can advise clients where
ME should run, why cams need specific targeting options and how much
their initial test budget should be.

Traffic Stars, Peter Rabenseifner,
Managing Director
Link: TrafficStars.com
Tags: Display Banner, Pop, Native, Video, Adult, Postitial, Cam, Dating, Nutra,
Gaming, Gambling, VR, Retargeting

TrafficStars was founded in December 2014 and we began by monetizing
xHamster’s traffic in March 2015.
Since then, we’ve been working hard to create the best technology in
the industry, collaborate with high quality publishers and advertisers; and
we now have more than 40 staff members, spread out worldwide over 3
offices in Barcelona, Cyprus and Montreal.
We have more than 1.5 billion impressions per day from over 400 unique
adult publishers and offer all major ad formats; including Banners,
Popunders, Native Ads, Video Pre-Roll and Postitial.
Despite only launching our Native Ad format in January, we’re already the
biggest ad network in the industry - and with more and more publishers
going native, our Native Ad inventory is growing every week.

Our traffic volumes have been steadily increasing every month because
of new publishers that we regularly onboard, existing publishers that
increase the volumes of traffic that they send to us, and because we now
offer more ad formats and solutions for publishers. This trend shows
no sign of stopping due to the technological advances we are making
continuously and the hard work of our support teams who look after both
publishers and advertisers to ensure a fair and balanced ecosystem for all.
While CPMs initially fluctuated after Google’s new ad standards were
implemented, they have since stabilized and in some geos and ad formats
are even healthier than before. We are among the few ad networks who
keep growing because we help publishers to understand the new rules

applied by Google.

TrafficStars was aware of and had been preparing for these changes
for some time; our proprietary flagging software had already identified
and flagged all ad elements to allow publishers to easily block the non-
complying elements with the click of a single button. We have created a
shortcut especially for publishers to remove all non-compliant ads with a
single click.
Moreover, we have offered three new solutions which are fully compliant;
Native ads, Video pre-roll and Postitial - which allow both publishers
and advertisers to recuperate any volumes lost as a result of prohibited
elements.
We are already recording huge growth in these new ad formats - and with
more publishers adopting these solutions, and more advertisers enjoying
their great performance - this growth shows no sign of slowing down.
We’re noticing the largest growth with Native ads, as their very nature
fits perfectly in line with the adjusted direction of the industry, and they
convert exceptionally well because they are very well integrated, very well
targeted, are less disruptive than other ad formats and offer a truly added
value.

Cam, dating, nutra and games products are our most popular verticals as
they convert very well. The cam vertical in particular is set to grow even
more with the rise of video ads, which can convert cam offers that grab
the user’s attention very well.
Demand is consistent for the dating and nutra verticals which both show
signs of remaining strong, especially as new ad formats like native ads
convert these offers extremely well.
We expect to see gambling and casino verticals increase as it’s becoming

increasingly difficult to get traffic from other sources for advertisers from
these industries. We are also seeing a continued increase in popularity for

virtual reality products as consumer interest continues to grow.

Affiliates should definitely focus on our new ad formats; Native ads,
Video pre-roll and Postitial. We are growing our inventory for these ad
formats every week and CTR and conversion rates are outstanding for
these ad formats. We have also released our highly anticipated advanced
retargeting tool, which is being hailed as the most powerful retargeting
tool in the Adult Industry. Our advanced retargeting tool offers countless
combinations and capabilities, and is an extra aid for affiliates to use to
acquire even more converting traffic via our platform.
There are big opportunities for affiliates to utilise video ads with our
Video Pre-roll ad format for cam products, which although requires extra
resources to produce, is paying off extremely well for existing advertisers
as engagement rates are unparalleled.
Popunders and banner formats should definitely not be forgotten by

affiliates and while It can be challenging to be profitable in Tier 1 countries
across all ad formats where demand is high, we suggest affiliates to focus
on alternative geos with decent CPMs and huge volume such as Eastern
Europe, APAC and LATAM.

Zeropark - Neill David Burton, Head of
Account Management
Link: Zeropark.com
Tags: Pop, Domain, In App, Mainstream, Adult, Ecom, Sweepstakes, App

Install, Pin Submit, Crypto

Zeropark has been in operation since 2012. It started out as a domain
traffic network, which grew rapidly when it expanded into Pop. We
now have Domain, Pop and In app traffic with billions of targeted visits
available a month. You can check out current volumes here: www.
zeropark.com/volume it is up to date for the past 30 days.

In early 2017 the Zeropark team made the conscientious decision to
focus on quality sources. We cut down plenty of sources and improved
our filtering procedures in order to provide high quality traffic to our
advertisers. This is the reason why over the past few months our traffic
volumes have remained stable even with a little growth at the start of
March. The recent developments within the industry have not affected us.

As said in the previous answer most of our traffic volume has remained
pretty stable even with the new Google regulations. There are no
observable signs of extinction.
We expect that Pop traffic will pivot into other formats, but essentially
still be the same platform for ad delivery. We also expect to see a growth
in mobile ad formats from the likes of In App and Push Notification, the
latter of which we are also working on delivering.

When we joined the game in 2012 Survey and Sweeps campaigns were
dominating the market, then in early 2015 to mid 2016 Binary offers were
the biggest vertical. From late 2016 to late 2017 mobile apps were very
big, since then there has been a resurgence in Surveys & Sweeps and
E-commerce has been steadily growing.
However, we would like to advise our advertisers who run E-commerce

campaigns to keep in mind the new regulations of GDPR in Europe
(implementation is scheduled on May 26th) as it might affect their ability
to track cookies legally.

If affiliates are looking for a long term slow burn offer to build their
strategy off of, we would suggest Mobile Apps, Pin Submits and
E-commerce, as these verticals are stable and reliable for payouts.
If you have a large budget to blow and would like to see a very quick
return we would say that Surveys and Crypto-traders would be the way to
go.

Insights From Affiliate
Networks
Adcombo, Peter Brembar, Product

Manager
Link: Adcombo.com
Tags: Email, Facebook, COD, Free Trial, Crypto, Ecom, Nutra, Adult, Health
1) Intro and verticals

We’ve been on the market for a bit less than 4 years and our network
is already known by everyone. Mainly we are specializing on Cash on
Delivery offers, but we are trying to cover all verticals.
2) Declining verticals
We can see that Free Trial offers are going down as well as Crypto related
offers. After a huge boom in the end of 2017 it appears that Crypto and
ICO offers are losing their positions right now.
3) Growing verticals
E-commerce vertical has improved recently since more and more people
are starting to shop online. As well, Nutra offers are quite trendy, but here
a seasonality factor takes place. Usually a peak of popularity happens in
spring because every lady wants to be fit and sexy for a summer beach
season.
4) Stable verticals
Adult and Health Care offers can be defined as ever-greens. As we say
here in AdCombo: «boobs will always convert».
And Health Care, well everyone wants to be in good health and wellness,

so there are no surprises.
5) Declining/Growing traffic types

Social Media traffic is on the rise, if you know the right ways to get it
without a ban then you are a rich man. On the other hand, email traffic
is not having its finest hour nowadays because everyone is switching to
messengers and at the same time anti-spam filters are becoming more
advanced.

Addiliate, Christoph Brughmans, Co-
Founder
Link: Addiliate.com
Tags: Mobile Content, Pin Submit, Gaming, Ecom, Sweepstakes, Dating,

Browser Extension, Pop, Native, Facebook

Addiliate has been founded in March 2010 and we are a general and
global affiliate network which means we work in all verticals and in
all geos. We focus on direct cooperation with all our advertisers and
delivering premium payouts to all affiliates.
Mobile content is getting more difficult, especially tier 1 geo’s with pin
submit and 2 click flows. Smaller geos with 1 click are still going strong.
Apart from that, all verticals are performing better than we expected.
CPL gaming, e-commerce, and subscriptions offers are very good
verticals for us right now. I’d suggest new affiliates to focus on those.
4) Stable verticals
Sweepstakes, dating and browser extensions are always working well!

We were expecting a big decline in pop traffic with the new Google
regulations, but we haven’t seen a drop yet as our pubs are adapting to
the new standards and complying with them, so we’re happy to see that
trend. We see a lot of growth in Facebook and Native ads, there’s really
endless potential there.

Affiliaxe, Oran Furman, Senior Affiliate
Manager
Link: Affiliaxe.com
Tags: Mobile Content, Ecom, Software, Health, Beauty, Free Trial, Software,
Pop, Native, Facebook

We are in business for 6 years (if I’m not mistaken).
We are focusing on clean, white hat offers. Globally.
Well we already stopped working with mobile content offers a while back
but this is one vertical that is on a clear decline.
eCommerce is the big craze for more than 2 years now and in general we
believe that WH offers that also provide value to the customer (in addition
to the affiliate and advertiser) are the way forward. We need a win-win-
win situation to grow as a business and as an industry.
4) Stable verticals
Software for us is an ever-green vertical for example.
Same goes for health and beauty offers (less so the free trials as we all see
are experiencing big issues with the MIDs).

I can’t say I see a decline really. There is less focus on pops however as
more and more affiliates are looking to master the high(er) quality sources
such as native and FB. So as you can understand we see an increase in
those sources.

Aragon, Todd Stearn, Co-founder and
CEO
Link: Aragon-Advertising.com
Tags: Mobile Subscription, CC Submit, Browser Extension, Sweepstakes, Pay

Per Call, Insurance, Finance, Legal, Medical, Push, Facebook

Aragon Advertising has been in business for 6 years. Our network is the
#1 pay per call network according to Mthink Blue Book’s 2018 survey,
and we also have a significant amount of market research, mobile
subscription, CC submit, and browser extension offers.
We’ve seen a notable decrease in traffic for mobile subscription offers,
particularly on the non-incentivized side. Carriers and regulators
worldwide have cracked down due to fraudulent traffic and misleading
promotions that went way too far.
For our mobile subscription publishers, the switch to CC submits for
sweepstakes and entertainment offers has been hugely successful. There
are incent and non-incent varieties available, all across the globe, for the
intrepid affiliate to launch.
4) Stable verticals
Pay per call, hands down. With lead to call automation technologies
making it so easy – and affordable – for affiliates to generate web leads
and convert them into calls, there’s a lot of room to run with almost any
traffic channel. Whether you’ve got traffic in insurance, home services,
finance, legal, medical, or what have you, and whether you’re buying click
to call traffic or generating your own leads, there is money to be made –
and no account bans to worry about.

Push notifications are on the rise. It’s an obnoxious medium for a user to
get ads pushed to their desktop or mobile all the time so I don’t know
how much of a runway it has. Take advantage while it’s here though.
And Facebook, unlike what trendy news consumers say, is still top dog. If
you’ve been using it to push diet via cloaking you might be experiencing
some hard times, but if there’s one thing to remember about Facebook
that can make any vertical a success it’s this: content is king.

ArmorAds, Ivan Carrillo, Managing
Director of Kimia Group
Link: ArmorAds.com
Tags: Mobile Content, App Install, Gaming, Sweepstakes, Health, Beauty,

Nutra, Crypto, Adult, Pop, Google, Facebook

Kimia Group is just over 11 years old. Early this year, and after a new
company acquisition, we split the group into 5 branches and relaunched
our CPA affiliate network as ArmorAds, due to improvements in our anti-
fraud technology and optimization capabilities. Additionally, we also have
a CPI network under the name The Cactus Road. We specialize first and
foremost in mobile subscription offers, followed by apps and games,
sweeps, health & beauty and nutra.
Mobile content has suffered a lot over the past year due to carrier
regulations worldwide and malware app traffic. However, the market
has made a shift to create a “cleaner” traffic environment and content
providers are focusing on higher quality products for end users. This all
results in a scenario where affiliates still stand to make good ROI.
The same applies to CPI marketing; it’s no longer about massive number
of installs but about reaching the advertisers’ KPIs so you can have more
caps available to you and higher payouts.
Nutra – weight loss, vitamins & proteins, male enhancement, libido
enhancers
Health & Beauty - Skin care creams, makeup
Crypto offers - Despite the ban on Facebook and Google, those offers are
still profitable using the right angles and traffic sources like native ads.

4) Stable verticals
As mentioned above mobile content still has a profitable life that lies
ahead, especially in tier 2 and tier 3 territories such as Myanmar, Iran,
Kenya for example, that are still experiencing mobile adaptation. Adult is
always a market we can count on, from guys that have the desire and a
mobile telephone.

Overall pop traffic is on the decline and with a declining performance.
Social traffic from Google and Facebook and native are the on the rise
and out-performing traditional traffic networks.

Bitterstrawberry, Tommy Johnson,
Business Development Manager
Link: Bitterstrawberry.com
Tags: Adult, Mobile Content, Mobile Subscription, Nutra, Dating, Biz Op,
Crypto, Finance, Ecom, Sweepstakes, Gaming, Video, Facebook, Google

BitterStrawberry came into existence since 2010-2011, at a time when
the market was rapidly growing, yet there were few full-stack solutions
offering a global, yet HQ localized inventory of offers & resources for
affiliates and since then, we’ve been on the forefront of each massive
opportunity wave of the industry.
Crunching the numbers, it’s hard to pick out a clear winner, I’d say our
main focus is creating & implementing localized HQ offers, mainly mobile
content on both verticals, as our core focus is mobile, but we’re massively
engaging in e-commerce with fully-legal, no-prescription-required
natural supplements for muscle growth & performance enhancement, as
well as generating Premium Localized Adult Content Sites to fit the HQ
expectations of adult content consumers.
I wouldn’t pinpoint a specific niche with signs of clear decrease in
numbers, but what we’re seeing is that affiliates are becoming more
selective about the offers they choose to promote and spending more
time on tailoring funnels for evergreen offers instead of spending
budgets on large-scale arbitrage for sweepstakes & installs. One by one,
emerging markets were flooded with such products and consumers have
developed a blindness for them, regardless of how creative the landers
were developed.
This is why, understanding in which direction the market is growing,

within BitterStrawberry, we’ve begun focusing on developing products
that we, ourselves, as consumers, would follow through with.

I definitely see a trend of movement from the LQ to HQ offers, as more
and more regulators are making it harder for the affiliate to reach broad
audiences, either by blinding the fish tank or by issuing new, more
transparent rules such as the EU GDPR.
Definitely, localized services, more-consumer centric, pay-accessible and
with clearer user consent.
To name a few, localized nutra products such as ProtecVital, our own

brand of natural supplements for muscle growth and performance
enhancement, Dating, both Adult & Mainstream, Online Money Making,
Crypto & Finance Investment.
For affiliates, the real focus of 2018 should be how to integrate new
technologies which are not that inaccessible with the rest of the customer
journey, so that they can advertise better products, re-engage, and avoid
wasting retargeting efforts.
Along with mobile advertising, affiliate marketing will venture further

into video, voice and other emerging technologies. With the fast-pace
development of IoT, we believe the duopoly of Facebook & Google
will get competition from emerging IoT advertising hubs providing
advertisement space on a plethora of multi-channel user targeting
options.
4) Stable verticals
Mobile Content Subscriptions – Content is King! And consumers are
nowadays, more than ever, looking for HQ content to fill their time
spent on their devices, alongside apps with similar models. With offers in
over 180 GEOs and an extended education & experience in this sector,
BittterStrawberry offers a plethora of engaging, fast-flow subscription
process for a high variety of mobile content subscription offers.
Nutra – For this niche, we’re allocating higher budgets & focus, building
up our own brand of natural supplements for diet, performance
enhancement and muscle growth. Opening up for promotion within
Germany, Austria, Switzerland for top affiliates & partners, we’re carefully

setting the field for affiliates, offering a great collection of HQ Landings on
various angles, embedding HQ Video Testimonials & more.
E-Commerce - The growth of global e-commerce is mind-blowing and

with an estimated 39 % of online shoppers using social networks to get
inspiration for purchases, bundled with creative technology, not that
in-accessible, it’s a no-brainer that this niche hasn’t yet reached its full
potential for affiliates.
With products ranging anything from clothing to apparel, self-

improvement & supplements, we’re constantly adding more to our
extended marketplace inventory.

With a considerable % of our partners having generated traffic versus paid
traffic, it’s always a game of up & down when it comes to traffic volumes,
but looked on a wider angle, we see increase in traffic predominantly in
E-Commerce, Glamour, Gaming Pin Submits, Mainstream Content & Life-
Style.
As for decreasing signs, I’d point out Ringtones, some slight decrease in
Sweepstakes, definitely low on Lottery and High-KPI Financial Investment
Offers.
Overall, we’re seeing signs that the market is becoming more mature and
diversifying at a fast pace, and while few years ago, affiliates generally
had it really easy to scout users to their landers with few easy steps, now
they need to really up their game, making use of tools which provide
Innovative Data Analytics and switch to a clearer, consumer-centric
approach versus common practices used today.

Brokerbabe & Glize & Xcash, Stefan
Muelbaur, Co-Founder
Links: Brokerbabe.com, Glize.com, Xcash.com
Tags: Dating, Adult, Mobile Subscription, Ecom, COD, Video, Lead Gen,
Gambling, Email, Native

I am in the space now since 8 years. We run 3 different companies that
are relevant for affiliates under our umbrella. Brokerbabe is our adult
program and around since 2010. Glize the Mainstream Network since
2016, and since 2017 we run also Xcash that is fully focused on in-house
dating offers.
The mobile billing market already took a big dip some years ago, but the
last 6 months was really an execution on this vertical. The good flows
have nearly disappeared and what is left is a big amount of fraud with
Autosubs over inAPPs destroying the rest of the market. There is still
serious $$$ to be made but with way more effort and less outcome.
We made our first steps in the COD vertical but the competition was very
high, so we adapted the offers and instead of paying out for COD we pay
our partners for the SOI on these offers. In some way I consider these
offers as eCommerce and want to add that this is a great vertical. Every
time we are plugging in an offer that is eCommerce related it doesn’t take
long to get huge traction.
4) Stable verticals
In the adult space, definitely Videochat and Dating. Videochat is not such
a typical media buying vertical but with Blogs etc it works like a charm.
Dating has been running stable for ages, and now with our own dating
program we have here more going on than ever. In the mainstream sector
we are very stable with leadgen, what has been a focus of Glize since day
one. We also acquired a stack in Scorescasino which is growing a lot. In
all cases, it is important to have exclusivity, either with the offers or the
payout models.

The traffic in the mobile sector increased big time. The autosub ads are
sending literally billions of bot clicks every day to the smartlink networks,
so this is definitely growing but not in revenue because you can’t
monetize bots.
We see a huge increase in mailing traffic and native as well.

FB went a little bit down because affiliates become advertisers themselves
or create their own shops.

Clickdealer, Henry Whitfield, Head of
Global Supply
Link: Clickdealer.com
Tags: Mobile Content, Mobile Subscription, Ecom, Dating, Lead Gen, Finance,
Facebook, Video, VR

Last month we were excited to celebrate our sixth-year anniversary -
something we’re extremely proud of - now with teams operating in
Europe, Asia and North America. We have evolved in that time from
an affiliate network focused on specific niches, into a global marketing
company that provides solutions in countless verticals and markets.
It definitely feels like we’re on the tail end of the Mobile Content &
Subscription Services wave, due partly to regulatory changes that
continue to change the vertical but also the development, growth and
accessibility of the app marketplace.
Ecommmerce has really dominated affiliates conversations over the last
few years (Hello Shopify boom!) and continues proving to be a profit
giant, especially as more and more people become globally connected -
with affiliates using everything they’ve learned online to build ecommerce
based businesses.
4) Stable verticals
For us it goes back to the roots of Clickdealer, where dating has and
continues to be a mainstream and evergreen vertical for us - despite the
market and ecosystem of the industry continually changing over the
last six years. On top of that, traditional leadgen focused in markets like
financial solutions or solar services can be an excellent area to build an
ever-green focused enterprise!

The knee jerk reaction is to say that Facebook traffic will be on the
decline - but we still see it as the best platform to drive your message to
a targeted audience. On the other hand, we see the use of video-related
content as a traffic type that will see more and more growth, especially
with the rise of VR tech.

Gotzha, Fabrizio Manese, VP
Link: Gotzha.com
Tags: Mobile Content, Sweepstakes, Gambling, App Install, Nutra, Crypto,

Binary, Biz Op, Facebook, Pop, Display Banner

I’ve been in the space almost 5 years now. Traditionally we focused on
mobile content, sweepstakes and gambling. Lately we have been focusing
a lot more on apps and since 2018 we added nutra to our portfolio.
The trend of last year keeps continuing. The increasing issues with carriers
and operators are causing mobile content to gradually go down even
more. Good clickflows are close to non-existent and ROIs for advertisers
are decreasing, causing them to work with caps. What still works are
sweepstake pins in combination with facebook. There is still quite a lot to
be made from 2nd tier countries in Europe.
Obviously everyone is hopping on the crypto train; on a personal level
but also on a business level; making personal investments and running
affiliate crypto related offers.
Binary focused advertisers made the transition to crypto biz-ops. The

vertical took a small hit since Facebook restricted cryptocurrency ads.
The topic itself is also a bit less ‘hot’ since the market has been on a
downtrend in 2018. I expect a huge growth and run after the summer
though and people are always looking for new ways to invest. We have
been approached by projects to gather CPL data for their ICO.
For us the biggest growth has been in Apps. We have been taking this
market by storm. Utilities made a big comeback in 2018 and branded
apps have been performing really well. By optimising and having the right
fraud detection tools and being strict on the affiliate signup process you
can get very far in this vertical. Generally speaking we see that the bigger
experienced affiliates are able to scale up even more and it’s getting
harder for new affiliates to enter the space.
4) Stable verticals
For us its sweepstakes and social casino apps.

At the end of q1 affiliates started to have issues with facebook but they are
still able to keep their traffic relatively stable, the same applies to GDN.
Pops/display traffic has been growing for us since they are well-known
source for apps. Sweeps in combination with pops have been decreasing
quite a bit lately though.

Leadbit, Egor Bruskin, Founder
Link: Leadbit.com
Tags: Free Trial, COD, Pin Submit, Gambling, Ecom, Facebook, Native

Leadbit Group has been operating since 2013. This year we are
celebrating our 5th anniversary. Personally I’ve been in this business since
2005 and have been observing setups and have been setting up many
niches myself since then.
I can see the obvious decrease of demand for trials and there are a few
reasons for that. First is the overall decline in profits. The second is that
affiliates find more attractive and profitable verticals in Tier 1 & Tier 2
countries.
One of the most promising verticals that doubles annually is cash on
delivery. The rates of its growth can be compared to the pay-per-install
affiliate programs craze that happened a few years ago.
4) Stable verticals
Any verticals in use are profitable so we should talk about ROI. Cash on
delivery, pin submits, casino & betting, e-commerce are a few that are
showing steady growth. Each of these niches offers the opportunity to
make fast and significant profits.

Facebook is the absolute flagship, no alternatives on the horizon. Still
there are a few sources with constant growth thanks to new countries
and affiliates. I am talking about native advertising and adult networks,
but they are still not comparable to Facebook in terms of volumes and
possible margin.

Maxbounty, Brody Curtis, Senior Affiliate
Manager
Link: Maxbounty.com
Tags: Market Research, Health, Ecom, Sweepstakes, Biz Op, Facebook, Native

MaxBounty was first established as a CPA network in 2004. Our goal
has remained the same since then - to provide the best service possible
to both affiliates and advertisers by creating a seamless, global online
marketing experience, designed specifically for each client.
The offers that are predominantly earning our affiliates the most
money right now are in the market research, health, e-commerce and
sweepstake verticals. That said, we have over 2,000 active campaigns
across all verticals.
A few industry-related circumstances have had an impact on the amount
of money being made from health and diet campaigns. These include
regulation changes on platforms like Facebook, advertiser processing
issues, and even our own initiatives to strengthen compliance to improve
traffic quality. This is less of a decline or a downfall, and more of a by-
product of environmental factors. Adapting to changes like these will
always be a necessary component in digital marketing, whether you’re a
network, affiliate, or an advertiser.
Verticals that are currently showing some strong signs of growth are
e-commerce and market research. Both have been around a long time
and yet continually find a way to evolve with the industry. MaxBounty
affiliates have always found a lot of success running campaigns in those
verticals, so we often encourage affiliates who are new to the network to
do the same.

4) Stable verticals
We’ve recently launched several biz-opp campaigns that have seen some
great success in the few months they’ve been active. Biz-opps are not
new to affiliate marketing, but I feel like there is always a demand for
“make money from home” campaigns.
To me, a stable vertical would be the same verticals that I mentioned

above: market research, health, e-commerce, and sweeps. Consumers
are always going to want to make extra money, purchase products, win
prizes, or become healthier. Those inherent desires ensure those types of
verticals have longevity.

One traffic source that has some affiliates pulling their hair out right now
is Facebook. Facebook is a useful marketing tool and a great traffic source
to promote specific campaigns, but affiliates are limited in terms of what
they’re allowed to promote. I have personally seen several affiliates pause
their Facebook traffic and test out new traffic sources because of this.
In term of growth, I’ve always been a major fan of native networks,

and I’ve noticed that more of my affiliates are testing out native traffic
networks and seeing great success in doing so. I think the major reason
native is doing so well is because of its reach, as well as the broad
spectrum of what types of offer they can run on native networks.

Mobidea, Nelson Nascimento, Publishers
Director
Link: Mobidea.com
Tags: Mobile Subscription, Crypto, App Install, Sweepstakes, Dating, Adult,

Pop, Native

We’ve been in the business for almost 7 years. Now, we’re focusing on
Dating, Adult, Sweepstakes, Health and Fitness/Beauty, Utilities. We’re
working with CPA, CPL, and CPS. We also have some Crypto Offers!
It’s not a secret: the mobile subscription business is becoming tougher for
everyone. Despite that fact, we believe that there are still great markets
to be explored. There’s a lot of potential for our affiliates to keep making
good money.
Crypto is definitely looking very interesting. We believe there’s
tremendous potential in crypto affiliate marketing.
4) Stable verticals
Based on the feedback our affiliates have given us and on the stats we
analyze on a daily basis, we know that Coupons & Vouchers, Dating,
Sweepstakes, and Adult are still the stable money makers in this game.

That decline is obvious when we talk about classic display ads. Until now,
pops had always remained popular, since affiliates were betting more
on high-quality prelanders. Even so, we still need to see how things will
develop, considering that there has been a Google update. Moreover, we
also notice that there are more affiliates working with Native Ads.

Monetizer, Vincent Schilberg, MD
Germany
Link: Monetizer.com
Tags: Mobile Subscription, Lead Gen, App Install, Sweepstakes, In App,

Facebook, Pop

Monetizer started running the first campaigns 4-5 years ago. We mainly
(but not exclusively) focus on Mobile content offers, but were additionally
quite successfully promoting more and more CPI and CPL offers the past
2 years.
Carrier billing, since it declined due to less conversion friendly flows.
We think lead generation and CPI offers can generate huge numbers, but
quality and legitimacy of the traffic has never been more important than
today. For lead generation there is an increase of bot traffic and invalid
traffic that has to be detected and filtered out, ultimately complicating the
market for CPL offers if not handled accordingly.
4) Stable verticals
Sweepstakes, but of course the quality of the traffic has to be as high as
ever - too many invalid leads have led traffic sources as well as Advertisers
to take precautions in order to avoid fraud conversions.

Pop and social traffic is still working very well, whereas in-app traffic,
especially APKs, lost a lot of value and is getting filtered out more and
more by advertisers and networks.

Mundo Media, Mike Semira, VP Supply
Sales
Link: Mundomedia.com
Tags: App Install, Gambling, Ecom, Native, Lead Gen, Dating, Pop

MUNDO Media has been in operation since 2009. We credit our longevity
in the space directly to our unmatched ability to offer a diverse portfolio
of campaigns, along with making the extra effort to work closely with our
partners to learn new and exciting ways to monetize traffic.
We believe all verticals go through their respective business cycles, where
a boom is always followed by a slow down period. However, even within
a specific vertical there are those at opposite ends of the spectrum, as
there are partners that are cutting spend while others are aggressively
spending to win market share. With that being said, we see the app space
going through an adjustment period – where advertisers are relying a lot
more on data to dictate how they want to spend their UA budget.
We’re seeing a massive boom in the demand for more real money casino
offers and stable eCommerce products. I always advise our supply
partners to connect with their Publisher Manager to stay up to date
on not only the top verticals at MUNDO, but also the top campaigns,
seasonal opportunities and methods of promotion. In our industry
things often change from week to week, so keeping an open line of
communication is key to staying on top of things.
4) Stable verticals
I’d like to flip that question around a bit, as I don’t like attaching the term
‘stable’ to verticals. I think the biggest factors that contribute to the actual
stability of a campaign is more related to how publishers are accessing
traffic and the types of campaigns that are being promoted. With that in
mind, most verticals can be made stable when there’s consistent access
to traffic.

Native ads have shown the versatility to work with a number of our
verticals, as we’ve seen everything from apps, lead-gen, eCommerce,
dating and casino do well on those placements. We’re excited to see
further growth from that inventory, especially spreading out into more
international markets. On the other hand, with the constant updates from
browsers – pop traffic has been on the decline as a preferred traffic type
across our supply partners.

Yeahmobi, Maggie Xu, Associate Director
Link: Yeahmobi.com
Tags: Mobile Content, COD, Free Trial, Gaming, App Install, Facebook, In App,
Video

We had been in operation since 2011, almost 8 years long. We focus
on CPI, CPA, CPL, CPS, CPE, covering a lot of categories such as
e-commerce, game, utility, and some mobile content offers.
Mobile content dropped a lot since one year ago, everybody is finding a
way to recover.
Some ecommerce offers like COD, free trial, or shops via shopify are
more attractive compared with others.
4) Stable verticals
M-commerce applications take a relatively higher percentage in this
market compared with others.

Of course FB has kept up growth in the past year, but we cannot tell what
the future has in store after FB solves the terrible issues. Same with in-app
video and playable traffic, more and more advertisers prefer to buy traffic
from some SDK companies and ADX.

Advidi, Petar Joseph, Head of Marketing
and Communications
Link: advidi.com, Petar Joseph’s STM profile
Tags: Mobile Content, COD, Free Trial, Gaming, App Install, Facebook, In App,
Video

We’ll celebrate our 7th anniversary soon. We have exclusive offers and
traffic in Dating, Health & Beauty (Nutra), Mainstream (mobile/sweeps),
Gaming & iGaming and will be shortly entering into Ecom, Travel and
Financial due to publisher demand and market opportunity.
Exciting time ahead for us as we have huge demand from our set of
publishers to get new verticals on board and we are striving hard to make
that happen in 2018.
Nutra is in an interesting place right now. Some people are reinventing the
wheel and working on CLV or whitehat. Others are taking their winning
model to INTL Trials and Straight Sales. Both have proven viable for us -
we’ve been working with our affiliates and advertisers to come up with
some customized solutions for each. So while the traditional Trial model
is still in limbo in the US, we’re seeing some creative players find new
success in unsaturated markets.
There are some others, but since we’re not highly active in them, we can’t
really speak to the nuances. Who knows - there could be something big
coming. You only know that when you’re really involved for a while, like
with Nutra, where you can see the cycles (and then the potential that
others can’t).
We’re long-term thinkers, so we try to operate only in verticals that we
expect to grow in coming years. We can’t reveal much right now, but

we’ve been listening really closely to our partners lately - of course, we’re
always listening, but there are some really exciting opportunities that have
been placed in front of us lately. In this regard, you’ll see us pushing the
industry standard a bit, focusing on leveraging our previous successes
into fast-paced changes based on what our publishers are demanding…
stay tuned!
With that said, we’re especially impressed by recent growth in Dating.

New GEOs are opening up whole worlds of opportunity. We’re working
with some partners who are about to make our Dating affiliates very, very
happy, with a new spin on an old favorite.
As for immediate potential, Gaming and App Installs are both very big
markets that aren’t facing many challenges for affiliates right now. Lots of
money on the table. They’re very risk-averse verticals and can even open
doors to new products. It’s an open playing field, and we expect affiliates
from our space will find quick success there. We’ve already got traffic and
offers in both verticals, and we’re pushing up the launch date because it’s
growing so quickly.
4) Stable verticals
We work in primarily evergreen verticals. As said above, it’s an important
part of our approach to an industry that changes every day.
Dating, for example, will always remain viable. People desire connections;
it’s a basic social need. The methods for promoting it may change, but
the vertical will continue to thrive.
Nutra has faced challenges recently, but we’ve seen this cycle before.
It’s still a very strong model and we’re excited about international
opportunities and straight sales. The first successful ads ever created were
for medicines and weight loss products. Tactics will change but the basic
human desires won’t.
Mainstream is at an all-time high… I don’t think we need to tell STMers

that mobile is gonna keep getting bigger.
iGaming won’t go anywhere any time soon, and new markets are
opening for it. It’s trickier to get started, but once you’re in, you can
expect big sustainable returns.

Native and media buying are huge within our network, and they match
our verticals well. We obviously can’t give any precise statistics, but
we can draw some conclusions based on the feedback we get from
our affiliates. When someone is killing it on a source like Natives,
they want to push it as far as it can go. Sometimes that means new
verticals… if someone’s doing so well on a single source that they feel
confident creating new funnels for completely different offers, we know
something’s working. So we listen and try to create an easy path for them.
Facebook is going to get trickier - but we’ve already seen some really
creative solutions working out very well. They’re clearly in the process of
refining some things, and they beat their Q1 target recently, even with all
the negative press. It’s still the best by a wide margin and we expect it to
get more competitive, but it’s not going anywhere.
The Chrome adblocker update didn’t hit as hard as many thought it

would. It’s a sign of the times. Consumers are getting more aware.
Segmenting and psychographics will only rise in importance… and that
means data. Your data is your business for many affiliates.

Summary
Congrats on making it this far in the report! Or did you cheat a bit and
scroll down for the final summary straight away? :) One way or another,
here we go with the key takeaways from the replies of those who
participated, combined with the insights of the STM team who worked
hard to put this report together.
The Walking Dead

Everyone has been feeling it for a while, but this report made it
official: Mobile PINs (Carrier Billing Offers) have declined by quite a bit.
Strengthened regulations sent conversion rates to levels where it’s almost
impossible to stay profitable. There are still offers that do convert, but
these are hard to find. If you still want to give this type of offers a go,
focus on emerging markets with more lenient regulations.
Free trial offers in the nutra vertical have suffered considerably during the
past few months, especially in the most-developed markets such as the
US. Caps are hard to find, and unless something changes, these offers will
continue to suffer. (Please note that here we are only talking about the
free trial billing model, not the entire Nutra vertical - the latter still thriving,
as you’ve undoubtedly noticed from many of the contributors earlier.)
One Foot in the Grave, But Still Alive

Pop traffic was expected by many people to be heavily affected by the
Google Chrome update scheduled for February this year. Fortunately for
many, after the update was released, it was obvious that pops weren’t
going anywhere. Based on internal STM research and also on the answers
in this report, the available volumes of pop traffic didn’t change much at
all. Affiliates do report worse conversion rates, but that can be attributed
to a temporary lack of good offers in general.
Pop traffic continue to be flooded with bots - which has recently started
to find its way into the 3G sector. Time to get used to running a bot test

even for 3G campaigns!
Despite these drawbacks, pop traffic continues to be the ideal playground

for new affiliates, due to its relatively lower prices and more lenient
campaign approval criteria.
App installs were on fire a couple years ago, and many people made
mad money by promoting the most popular Battery Saving and Speed
Boosting apps, but those times are over. Eventually, even the biggest
Chinese app owners realized that the high payouts were not working
out for them. As a result, they lowered the commissions per install and
started to require high retention rates that were difficult to achieve for the
average affiliate.
On the other hand, the gaming app industry is thriving and a ton of ads
are being served in that segment, especially the incentivized ones (i.e.
watch a video to get some goodie). Looks like the business moved more
in the direction of making direct deals with ad networks, leaving limited
space for affiliates.
Coming Back From the Dead

Push notifications seem to be making a big comeback. This format was
very popular in the early mobile days, when both Android and iOS devices
didn’t really limit its use. Once again, affiliates and traffic networks are
both seeking to utilize this permission-based format, in an effort to imitate
list building and secure themselves a longer lasting stream of clicks. We
see this in both the mobile and desktop worlds.
The Survivors
Many of the verticals or traffic types that were popular in 2017 are running
strong through 2018 as well.
Let’s start with traffic types: Banners are running strong, especially in the
adult part of the business. Mainstream part has seen quite a large shift
towards native banner formats.

Native has been growing across the board, lately also in the adult industry.
It’s a bit ironic that, although the native format actually is an invention of
the adult industry, it rose to fame in the mainstream world.
Email traffic continues to deliver steady conversions and there is some

good news here - some sources have started to offer email traffic on a
CPC basis, which wasn’t common before. This makes initial testing more
accessible to regular affiliates.
The big duo, i.e. Google and Facebook, continue to dominate the paid
advertising space, followed by Bing. Google Adwords continues to be
the best source for all kinds of (whitehat) Lead Gen offers and remains
the place to test whether your product has selling potential. If you can’t
sell a product via targeted Adwords traffic, it would be difficult to make it
convert elsewhere.
Facebook is still the eCommerce store owner’s best friend, arguably

offering the best targeting options out of all advertising platforms.
However, with the recent heat FB is put under from the Cambridge
Analytica scandal, they have become harder to work with. It is becoming
increasing difficult to run blackhat, as they invest more and more time and
effort into detecting cloaking and catching other non-compliant activities.
For those who learn how to play by the book, FB can still be one of the
best sources of traffic.
Ecommerce has already been mentioned, but let’s talk about it some
more. Although the shopify + dropshipping model continues to work,
more and more customers are becoming aware that they can order
directly from Aliexpress at cheaper prices. Also, long delivery times are a
major deterrent. Those who are serious about ecommerce should look
into ways to up their game: Source products from manufacturers to lower
costs, decrease delivery times, sell higher-quality products, provide better
customer service, establish their own brand, etc. eCom is not going
anywhere and it’s growing globally.
If there is an area where not much changes year after year, it would be
adult traffic. It’s been dominated by dating offers for a few years and this
won’t likely change anytime soon. Users are ready for something more
innovative, but it simply isn’t happening. It’s still the same song: Dating,

cams, male enhancement, ED and testosterone products remain major
offer types. There is one promising candidate: Virtual Reality adult movies,
which is a segment that is on the rise. For now it’s hard to monetize these
with paid clicks, but those that receive free organic traffic should definitely
give it a try.
Although offer verticals are stable in the adult advertising world,

regulations imposed on creatives in Q1 of this year have introduced
turbulence. Say hello to the Google “Better Ads” initiative, which has sent
shock-waves through the adult traffic networks. The result? Say goodbye
to the previously-ubiquitous blinking chat banners that aimed to fool
visitors into thinking hot girls/guys are wanting to chat them up. But that’s
just one restriction that is relatively clear to everyone. Because the rules
are quite strict and different affiliates, advertisers and traffic networks have
been interpreting them differently, the past few months have been pretty
hardcore for every adult media buyer. As everyone is getting a hang of the
new rules though, things are starting to return to normal.
There are evergreen verticals that will make solid choices for affiliate who
are planning to be in this industry for the long haul. Some of the most
stable ones are Dating, Nutra, Gambling/Casino, Information products,
and Lead Generation offers of all kinds - these can be complicated form
submits like Solar, Insurance, Financing or very simple ones like short
surveys or Sweepstakes offers.
Sweeps are one of the most stable verticals and possibly the most
popular among newbies. These are usually simple SOI or DOI leadgen
offers, with “win a Samsung/ Apple product” being the most popular,
although shopping vouchers are becoming more and more prominent as
well. Tesco, Walmart or IKEA coupons have been around, but more variety
is being introduced, for example for specific products such as Nutela and
Milka chocolate.
The Runner Ups ...

In many business sectors, when certain segments die out, there will be
new ones to take their place. Affiliate marketing is no exception.
We are seeing more and more interest in video ad formats. This has been
ongoing for some time, but more so now than ever. Facebook is full of
video ads, Youtube is making a lot of advertisers rich. Video advertising
is the future and affiliate marketers should take adapt sooner rather than
later.
Available volumes for Members Area traffic continue to increase as more

membership sites sprout up and as existing sites grow their membership
base. The biggest sub-niche is Dating Site Members Area, for both
mainstream and adult. This type of traffic is among the highest-quality
traffic money can buy, but naturally, costs are among the highest as well.
COD (cash on delivery) has seen massive growth in the past year or
so, especially in countries where credit card penetration is low or non-
existent. Nutra and adult products are just examples of what are selling
very well with COD. If you want to sell physical products in certain
European countries for example, you simply must offer COD, because
there are countries that are just so used to that payment method.
Let’s not forget about Crypto Currencies, they caused mass hysteria at the
end of 2017. Although with the sharp drop in crypto prices around the
start of the year, the interest in crypto has waned, another bull run would
no doubt send everyone into a frenzy again. We are already seeing the
signs of some growth and if it holds, Crypto offers will be an awesome
opportunity for achieving high ROIs with. It may be a good idea to ask
your affiliate managers now to get an idea on which networks have the
best crypto offers so you’ll be prepared to capitalize on the craze if/
once it starts again – rumor has it that it will happen before the summer
(although obviously, nobody will know for sure until it happens).
And That’s a Wrap!

On behalf of STM and all the contributors, we would like to thank you for
reading this report.
Many of the contributors are members of STMForum.com. To access

more of their wisdom, which they’ve kindly shared on the forum, please
join STM now (use coupon code STM2018 for 20% off the 1st month).

Next Step
Now that you have a good idea on “what’s working”, take advantage of
this insight and capitalize on the best verticals and traffic right now - while
they’re still hot!
Easier said than done, you say? Don’t worry, we got your back.
If you have questions on how to take advantage of the intel presented in
this report, we at STMForum.com would be happy to help! The following
are just some of what you will find on the forums:
• Over 38k threads consisting of close to 330k posts.
• A “Success Stories” section containing reports of major successes

posted by forum members.
• A “Newbie Zone” section dedicated to helping complete newbies get

up and running. Contains lots of guides, including a step-by-step 40-
day beginner’s tutorial that teaches everything from setting up tracking,
to choosing offers, to preparing landing pages, to creating campaigns, to
analyzing data, to tweaking campaigns to profitability.
• Other comprehensive guides and tutorials including the eCommerce

Cookbook and the Facebook Scaling Mastery Tutorial.
• Forum sections with discussions on different traffic types including:

Facebook, Mobile, Native, Adult, Search (Adwords/Bing), Email, etc.
• Discounts and coupons from various tools and services.
• “Follow-Along” sections where you can create a thread to document

your campaigns to receive feedback from moderators and the rest of the
community, and to ask any questions when you’re stuck. This is the next
best thing to having a coach or mentor, and as a member you’ll get that at
a small fraction of the price.
• Forum sections on various Technical & Creative Skills, including

campaign tracking, programming, banner and landing page design, and

copywriting.
• A “Masterminds” section for members to form groups to work towards

success together.
• Lots of case studies documenting how profitable campaigns are made.
You can preview some of our forum content here: https://stmforum.

com/preview/
Our forum moderators and members jointly possess expertise in many

areas of affiliate marketing, and many traffic networks and affiliate
networks have a presence on our forums as well.
You can read about members of our moderation team here: https://
stmforum.com/join/
In fact, most of the individuals and networks included in this report are
members of STMForum.com! Check out our forum for more valuable
content contributed by some of these members.
JOIN STMFORUM NOW
We’ll see you on the inside!
Respectfully,
STMForum.com

Affiliate Marketing Acronyms
6WAMC - 6-Week Affiliate Mastery Course - 6WAMC.com

ADX - Google DoubleClick Ad Exchange
Aff - Affiliate
Algo - Algorithm
AM - Affiliate Marketing or Affiliate Manager
APAC - Asian Pacific Countries
Autosub - Auto Subscription
B2B - Business-to-Business
BH - Blackhat
Biz Dev - Business Development
Biz Op / Bizopp - Business Opportunities (e.g. Work From Home)
CA - Cambridge Analytica
CBD - Cannabidiol
CC - Credit Card
COD - Cash On Delivery
CPA - Cost Per Action
CPC - Cost Per Click
CPE - Cost Per Engagement
CPI - Cost Per Install
CPL - Cost Per Lead
CPM - Cost Per Mille (cost per thousand impressions)
CPS - Cost Per Sale
CTR - Click Through Rate
DCB - Direct Carrier Billing - offers that allow users to subscribe to by
charging payments to their mobile phone bill
DSP - Demand-Side Platform - platform that allows an advertiser to buy
traffic from ad exchanges
Ecom - Ecommerce (typically refers to physical goods being sold online)
ED - Erectile Dysfunction
EU - European Union
FB - Facebook
GDN - Google Display Network
GDPR - General Data Protection Regulation
Geo - Country
HQ - High Quality
InApp - Anything within mobile apps (e.g. advertising banners)
IoT - Internet of Things
KPI - Key Performance Indicator
LATAM - Latin America
Leadgen - Lead Generation
LQ - Low Quality
ME - Male Enhancement
MID - Merchant Identification Number - a unique code given to a
business by payment processors before a merchants begin processing
credit cards
Monetizer - Traffic monetization service, Monetizer.com
Nutra - Nutraceutical Products - such as diet pills and male enhancement
pills
OG - Original Gangster - something that’s been around for a long time
and is dominating the space
Pins - Pin Submit Offers
POF - Plenty of Fish
Pop - popunder and popup/popover traffic
PPE - Page Post Engagement (Facebook)
PPV - Pay Per View (pop traffic, domain redirect traffic)
Push - Push Notification
ROI - Return On Investment (=Profit/Cost)
RPM - Revenue Per Mille (revenue per thousand impressions)
SaaS - Software as a Service
SDK - Software Developer Kit
SEO - Search Engine Optimization
SOI - Single Opt-In
SSP - Supply-Side Platform / Sell-Side Platform - platform that enables
web publishers to fill their ad space with ads
STM - STMForum.com - #1 Affiliate Marketing Online Forum, founded in
2011 (use coupon code STM2018 for 20% off the 1st month)
Sweeps - Sweepstakes Offers
TA - Teaching Assistant
TOS - Terms of Service
UA - User Acquisition
VoD - Video On Demand
VPN - Virtual Private Network
VR - Virtual Reality
WH - Whitehat


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2018

Report compiled by:

Matej Cechvala (aka Matuloo), Amy Cheung (aka Vortex),

No part of this report may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by

The insights provided by each individual affiliate or company

STMForum.com or iStack Holdings Inc. do not assume and hereby

Brought to you by STMForum.com, the #1 Premium Affiliate Marketing Community

Before Reading This Report 8

Bird’s Eye View 11

Intel From Spy Tools 13

Insights From Affiliates & Other Industry Experts 18

Brought to you by STMForum.com, the #1 Premium Affiliate Marketing Community

Insights From Traffic Networks 70

Insights From Affiliate Networks 102

Brought to you by STMForum.com, the #1 Premium Affiliate Marketing Community

Next Step 135

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We wanted to turn this into a real community collaboration.

We wanted the result to contain a ton of value.

We decided to provide the information free-of-charge to everyone.

Brought to you by STMForum.com, the #1 Premium Affiliate Marketing Community

As it turned out, everyone was very supportive of our endeavor. In just

We at STMForum.com would like to dedicate this report to Hugh

In Memory of Caurmen - Tribute by Lorenzo (MrGreen), STM Co-

Machinima founder and VR developer Hugh Hancock has passed away

In Memoriam: Hugh Hancock

We know Hugh would be proud and appreciative of everyone who has

With Much Appreciation,

Amy and Matej, Senior STM Moderators

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1) This report is separated into 4 main sections:

a)Intel from Spy Tools

b)Insights From Affiliates and Other Industry Experts

c)Insights From Traffic Networks

d)Insights From Affiliate Networks

Instead, we will be replacing each long question with a much shorter

Will be replaced by just:

2) Because many replies contain intel on multiple verticals and traffic

Brought to you by STMForum.com, the #1 Premium Affiliate Marketing Community

3) In each section, replies are ordered by the starting alphabet of

Questions for Affiliates & Other Industry Experts:

4. Where do you see the affiliate marketing industry headed in 2018, in

Questions for Traffic Sources:

Brought to you by STMForum.com, the #1 Premium Affiliate Marketing Community

Questions for Affiliate Networks:

4. Are there verticals that are ever-green/stable? (Short: Stable verticals)

Questions for Spy Tool Owners:

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However, we thought it would help to provide an overview first, in

Every positive comment we see in their replies, directed at a specific

Disclaimer: What qualifies as a “positive comment” is subject to our

Note: Input from traffic networks is excluded to keep this graph as

Brought to you by STMForum.com, the #1 Premium Affiliate Marketing Community

Note 2: “Dating” includes mainstream and adult dating. “Finance”

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Adplexity, Ziga Naglic, Founder

Tags: Native, Pop, Desktop, Adult, Sweepstakes, Mobile Subscription,

We are monitoring mobile, native, desktop and adult advertising markets

As a result it’s pretty hard nowadays to find good converting sustainable

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At this moment, even though we still see a bunch of different verticals

Brought to you by STMForum.com, the #1 Premium Affiliate Marketing Community